The worldwide IT market this year will be top $4.5 trillion. Spending on public cloud rose nearly 23% in Q1. And although security spending rose nearly 12% earlier this year, nearly 8 in 10 financial-services firms have suffered a cyber breach.
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Worldwide IT market
How big is the worldwide IT market? Big indeed—about $4.7 trillion. That’s the forecast for this year from advisory firm Gartner.
Assuming Gartner’s right, that would mark an increase over last year’s spending of 4.3%.
Some sectors are growing faster than others. Take software. Gartner expects the global software spend will rise 13.5% this year over last, for a worldwide total of $911 billion. Looking ahead to next year, Gartner expects more of the same: software spending in 2024 will rise 14%, exceeding $1 trillion.
The second-fastest growing sector is IT services. For this sector, Gartner predicts spending will rise nearly 9% this year over last, for a 2023 global total of $1.4 trillion. And next year, Gartner expects, services spending will rise by an even higher 11%, totaling $1.58 trillion worldwide.
How about spending on the new hot technology, generative AI? Surprisingly, Gartner says it has not yet made a significant impact. Instead, says Gartner analyst John-David Lovelock, “most enterprises will incorporate generative AI in a slow and controlled manner through upgrades to tools already built into their IT budgets.”
Public cloud
Public-cloud spending is on a tear. Last year, according to market watcher IDC, worldwide revenue for public-cloud services rose nearly 23% over 2021’s level, for a total of $545.8 billion.
The largest segment by revenue was SaaS applications, accounting for more than 45% of the total, or about $246 million. It was followed by IaaS (21% market share), PaaS (17%) and SaaS system infrastructure software (16%), IDC says.
By vendor, just 5 suppliers—Microsoft, AWS, Salesforce, Google and Oracle—collectively captured more than 40% of the 2022 global public-cloud market. The No. 1 spot was held by Microsoft, with a market share of nearly 17%.
Being on top is important. “Most organizations,” says Lara Greden, an IDC researcher, “rank their public-cloud provider as their most strategic technology partner.”
Finance cyber breaches
Cyber breaches used to be rare events. No more. A new report finds that nearly 8 in 10 financial-services organizations (78%) have experienced a cyber breach, cyber threat and data theft.
The report was compiled by Skyhigh Security, a cloud-native security vendor that worked with market researcher Vanson Bourne to poll nearly 125 IT decision-makers in 9 countries, including the U.S. and Canada. Respondents all worked for large financial-services organizations with at least 500 employees.
Why is financial services such a big target for cybercrooks? Because, as Willie Sutton reportedly quipped when asked why he robbed banks, “that’s where the money is.”
Skyhigh’s survey also found that about 6 in 10 financial-services firms store sensitive data in the public cloud, although Skyhigh didn’t correlate that with the high percentage of companies that have been cybercrime targets. But one way to secure cloud data, using a cloud access security broker, is employed by fewer than half the respondents (44%).
Also, more than 8 in 10 survey respondents believe that “shadow IT”—the practice of non-IT business units acquiring tech hardware, software and services without the IT department’s approval or knowledge—impairs their ability to keep data secure.
Cyber spending
All those attacks are certainly not due to a lack of spending. Indeed, global spending on cybersecurity products and services rose by 12.5% year-on-year in this year’s first quarter, according to market watcher Canalys.
Spending growth was fastest among midsize organizations, those with 100 to 499 employees, Canalys finds. Within this group, cybersec spending in Q1 rose 13.5% year-on-year.
Spending rose almost as fast for large organizations, those with 500 or more employees: an increase of 13.3%. For small businesses, those with 10 to 99 employees, cybersec spending in Q1 rose just 7.5%, Canalys says.
Market concentration is evident here, too. Nearly half of all cybersec spending (48.6%) went to just 12 vendors, Canalys finds. Three in particular dominated during Q1: Palo Alto Networks (8.7% market share), Fortinet (7%) and Cisco (6.1%).
By region, Canalys finds, North America to have been the largest market for cybersecurity products and services in Q1, at $9.7 billion. But both EMEA and Latin America saw faster sales growth: 13.4% for EMEA and 15.2% for LatAm, compared with 12.3% for North America.