The rise of security

FRAMINGHAM, Mass.—Several reports have come out in the past month looking to quantify growth within security, each illuminating the fact that the industry is growing both here in North America and globally as well.

In terms of the global security market, the first Worldwide Semiannual Security Spending Guide from International Data Corporation (IDC), released last week, forecasts that worldwide revenues for security-related hardware, software, and services will grow from $73.7 billion in 2016 to $101.6 billion in 2020—at a CAGR of 8.3 percent, more than twice the rate of overall IT spending growth over the five-year forecast period.

The largest category of investment will be security-related services, which will account for nearly 45 percent of all security spending worldwide in 2016, and the largest segment within that category, managed security services, is forecast to generate revenues of $13 billion this year. Security software will be the second largest category in 2016, with endpoint security, identity and access management, and security and vulnerability management software driving more than 75 percent of the category's revenues.

The industries making the largest investments in security solutions in 2016 will be banking ($8.6 billion), followed by discrete manufacturing, federal/central government, and process manufacturing. The industries that will see the fastest growth in their security investments will be healthcare, followed by telecommunications, utilities, state/local government, and securities and investment services. Each of these industries will experience CAGRs above 9.0 percent over the forecast period.

Interestingly, one of the fastest growing segments of the security products market will be user-behavior analytics software—growing at a CAGR of 12.2 percent through 2020, an area that many of our "20 under 40" Class of 2016 winners, both integrators and end users, mentioned as one of the most promising technology areas right now in the industry.

Many are working to get to a point where all of the data coming in, including video, can be mined and managed for use with predictive analytics, better time management, faster and more accurate alarm verification, operational efficiencies—the list goes on an on.

The topic also generated a lot of interest in this month's News Poll, where we asked you, our readers, about the top emerging technologies coming out of ASIS 2016 in September. According to 43 percent of respondents, video surveillance and VMS was the most talked about technology at ASIS 2016, with thirty-one percent saying that big data/analytics was the most talked about.

All told, there is a lot to get excited about in the industry right now.