Cybersecurity spending is expected to continue growing as cyberattacks proliferate and organizations safeguard their generative AI platforms, IT consultant Gartner reported.
Global end-user information security spending is expected to total $212 billion in 2025, up 15.1% from $183.9 billion in 2024, according to Gartner's Aug. 28 forecast.
"The continued heightened threat environment, cloud movement and talent crunch are pushing security to the top of the priorities list and pressing chief information security officers to increase their organization's security spend," said Shailendra Upadhyay, senior research principal at Gartner, in a statement. "Furthermore, organizations are currently assessing their endpoint protection platform and endpoint detection and response needs and making adjustments to boost their operational resilience and incident response following the CrowdStrike outage."
As organizations adopt generative AI, they will need added cybersecurity to protect those programs while also safeguarding against the increasing number of social engineering attacks that use large language models, according to Gartner. The consulting firm expects 17% of hacks to involve generative AI by 2027.
Meanwhile, the cybersecurity skills shortage will force organizations to spend more on security services (such as consulting, professional services and managed services), which is projected to be the fastest-growing segment in information security, Gartner said. Cloud security spending is also forecast to grow as more organizations move data to the cloud.