“Security and risk management leaders in MENA are expected to increase their spending in 2023 mainly because of an increased demand for technologies that secure remote work and hybrid environments, support digitisation and cloud migration,” said Shailendra Upadhyay, Principal Research at Gartner.

Gartner analysts recently discussed how to stay ahead of expanding scopes of responsibility and increasing threats at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, which took place in Dubai at the end of February.

Cloud security on the up

In 2023, cloud security spending is projected to record the highest growth at 19.5%, followed by application security spending, growing at 19%. Cloud security consists of cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs) and cloud access security broker. CWPPs are products and services that address protection requirements in diverse cloud-native workloads in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Their adoption in MENA is growing as organisations respond to the move toward digital transformation and the implementation of cloud applications.

In addition, the Gartner analysts suggest that increased security risks and complexity of operating and managing multiple technologies will drive MENA organisations to spend on cloud security and the share of cloud-native solutions is expected to grow in 2023.

In MENA, security and risk management leaders will increase their spending on technologies such as web application firewalls, access management, endpoint protection platform, secure web gateway to respond to the increased demand of remote workers and ensure secured work-from-home environments.

As zero trust network access (ZTNA) becomes the primary mechanism for user-to-application secure access, spending on ZTNA in the region is expected to grow. In MENA, the increased demand for zero trust protection for remote workers and organizations’ reduced dependence on VPNs for secure access will accelerate spending on ZTNA in 2023.

Security Services to represent 38% of total security spending in 2023

In 2023, the researchers say that security consulting spending, which is sub-segment of security services, will continue to grow due to higher demand for consulting services related to digital transformation projects, compliance mandates and incident response linked to the rise in ransomware attacks. In addition, managed security services spending growth will come from the increased adoption of high-growth services such as managed detection and response. However, hardware support and implementation services spending are on pace to be flat in 2023.