End-user spending on information security could reach $3.2 billion in 2025 in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, an increase of 14 percent year-on-year, according to a new forecast from Gartner Inc. Meanwhile, global end-user spending on information security will likely reach $212 billion in 2025, a 15.1 percent increase from 2024. In 2024, Gartner also expects global information security end-user spending to reach $183.9 billion.
“The continued growth in security spending in the MENA region is primarily driven by the constantly evolving regulatory environment and the rise in cyberattacks,” said Shailendra Upadhyay, senior research principal at Gartner.
In addition, digitalization and cloud migration are broadening the threat landscape for enterprises in the region. Therefore, chief information security officers (CISOs) are focusing on ensuring compliance with rapidly changing regulatory and privacy frameworks, countering persistent threats as well as addressing C-suite and board-level executives’ concerns regarding organizational resilience and cybersecurity posture.
GenAI raises investments in security software
The adoption of AI and generative AI (GenAI) continues to increase investments in security software markets like application security, data security and privacy, and infrastructure protection. GenAI will trigger a spike in the cybersecurity resources required to secure it, leading to a 15 percent increase in security software spending by 2025, the company added.
“The continued heightened threat environment, cloud movement and talent crunch are pushing security to the top of the priorities list and pressing CISOs to increase their organization’s security spend,” added Upadhyay.
Upadhyay added that organizations are currently assessing their endpoint protection platform (EPP) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) needs. In addition, they are making adjustments to boost their operational resilience and incident response following the CrowdStrike outage.
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Cyberattacks to increasingly involve GenAI
Since the release of GenAI, attackers have increasingly employed tools and large language models (LLMs) to carry out large-scale social engineering attacks. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 17 percent of total cyberattacks and data leaks will involve generative AI.
As organizations continue to move to the cloud, Gartner analysts expect an increase in cloud security solutions, and the market share of cloud-native solutions will grow. The total cloud access security brokers (CASB) and cloud workload protection platforms (CWPP) market will likely reach $8.7 billion in 2025, up from the forecasted $6.7 billion in 2024.
The global skills shortage in the cybersecurity industry is a major factor driving investment in the security services market which Gartner expects to grow faster than the other security segments.
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