CIOs must prepare for increase in endpoint security budget

As malware attacks grow more sophisticated, endpoint security has become critical than ever before. Traditional security practices are being replaced by advanced, next-gen solutions capable of dealing with the emerging threats.

According to Forrester Research, endpoint security market is valued $4.7 billion in 2017 and will grow to $5.9 billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 4 percent during 2016-21.

‘Application integrity protection’ and ‘endpoint visibility and control (EVC)’ segments are emerging as the top trends, demonstrating double-digit growth during the forecast period. According to Forrester, these new, emerging endpoint technologies will offset declines in more traditional endpoint security suites.

Analyzing the growing attack patterns, Forrester has found that cyber criminals are increasingly targeting corporate data, with almost half of the organizations experiencing at least one breach of sensitive data over the last 12 months.

Forrester Security report

Not surprisingly employee devices are the soft targets of the cybercriminals, with PCs contributing to a major bulk of the attacks.

Traditional anti-malware solutions lag in combating the advanced threats. Since they use frequent system checks and updates, they eat up system resources and slow down endpoint processes, drastically impacting employee productivity. Also, traditional solutions cannot detect non-file based threats, which is the case in most modern threats, says Forrester.

Advanced endpoint security software score over traditional solutions in combating modern threats. As opposed to the traditional signature based format, the new behavior-based endpoint security solutions can detect the non-file based malware, according to researchers at Forrester.

EVC solutions will see the fastest growth as they have the ability to analyze data from multiple sources and provide CIOs and security and risk (S&R) professionals with the ability to discover and stop potential threats before they propagate. The market for EVC solutions is expected to grow 23.2 percent over the next five years.

Application integrity protection, on the other hand, uses machine learning to proactively ensure that applications are running securely by monitoring deviations from “know good” code activity. With machine intelligence gaining popularity in this segment, the market for these endpoint tools is projected to grow at 19.1 percent CAGR over the next five years.

Considering the growth of modern endpoint solutions, the IT security budget of organizations is set to expand in the coming months. Forrester estimates that application whitelisting costs $20 to $50 per endpoint per year, and application integrity protection can be up to $60 per endpoint per year – as opposed to $10 to $25 per endpoint per year (much lower in the case of large enterprises) for traditional solutions.

Forrester securiry report -spending on endpoint security

The growing security risks and the associated budget has been a concern for CIOs and IT decision makers. Forrester says only 45 percent of global security decision makers plan to increase their spending on client threat management, up from 39 percent in 2015 (see Figure 3).

The year 2017 was a hit for hackers. Shadow Brokers, WannaCry, Petya, Cloudbleed, and more grabbed the attention of media headlines for several weeks. With more such exploits expected, CIOs should devise proactive defense strategies to protect the organization’s IT from future attacks.

Rajani Baburajan

[email protected]

 

 

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