Enterprise Information Security spend in Middle East and Africa will grow by 9.8 percent to reach about US$1.9 billion in 2019.
Businesses across the Middle East, mainly those within the manufacturing, retail and higher education are not investing on right security solutions.
IT research firm disclosed this during a press conference at the ongoing Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit in Dubai.
A lot of organisations do not have basic security controls in place. All they have are firewalls and antivirus,” says Sam Olyaei, principal research analyst at Gartner.
According to him, the trend is more evident among SMEs and those belonging to manufacturing, retail and higher education sectors. “We see effective implementation within the banking, finance, oil and gas and government departments,” he said, adding that the government sector within the region are more proactive and aware compared to government agencies in the rest of the world.
Elaborating on the point he said, “Many of them look for advanced and futuristic solutions when all they have to do is fix the basics. We have the money but spending on the wrong things. GCC is third highest spender on security solutions.”
According to Gartner, Enterprise Information Security spend in Middle East and Africa will grow by 9.8 per cent to reach about US$1.9 billion in 2019.
Most of the spending will come from users trying to implement cloud and data security solutions.
Investment into cloud security is expected to grow by about 108 per cent reaching about US$9 million by 2019 while data security is expected to be up by 17.6 per cent to reach US$125 million during the same period.
The overall security maturity level within the region was found to be 2.8 on a scale of 1 to 5 while, Europe stood at 3.2.
