A boatload of money to be spent on securing PCs, IoT and mobile devices

A new report forecasts $655 billion will be spent on securing PCs, IoT and mobile devices between now and 2020.

“In brief, our methodology includes looking at the current cost of securing systems, examining executives survey responses to how much they are planning to budget on cybersecurity in the future, and looking at the changing digital landscape to account for increased areas of cybersecurity spending,” says John Greenough, a senior research analyst for BI Intelligence at Business Insider.

BI breaks down the forecasted spending as follows:

• $386 billion will be spent on securing PCs
• $172 billion will be spent on securing IoT devices
• $113 billion will be spent on securing mobile devices

“Our forecast (for security spending) in 2015 was $78 billion and is growing to $145 billion in 2020 – representing a 13% 5-year CAGR (compound annual growth rate),” added Greenough.

The worldwide cybersecurity industry is defined by other market sizing estimates which range from $75 billion in 2015 to $170 billion by 2020. The cumulative spending between now and 2020 – according to these annual estimates – exceeds the $655 billion projected by BI.

According to IT analyst firm IDC, the hot areas for growth are security analytics/SIEM (10​ percent​); threat intelligence (more than 10 percent); mobile security (18 percent); and cloud security (50 percent). The BI report does not publicly feature spending figures around three out of four of these — which may account for the difference between their numbers and market projections by other firms who track the security sector.

Cybercrime propels security spending. Juniper Research recently predicted that the rapid digitization of consumers’ lives and enterprise records will increase the cost of data breaches to $2.1 trillion globally by 2019, increasing to almost four times the estimated cost of breaches in 2015.

If the cybersecurity industry remains in an upward trajectory, then in 2020 the IT analysts may be predicting five-year out cumulative spending forecasts (to 2025) at $1 trillion or more.