Specialised security detection services threaten traditional MSSPs

Gartner research has revealed that although security spending is set to top $113 billion by 2020, it's at the detriment of MSSPs, which are likely to see a hit to their business.

The reason for this is CISOs and security managers will turn to management platforms and services that are tailored to their market sector to bring into their business rather than seeking support from a provider.

"CISOs are keen to communicate the return on investment of their security strategy in terms of the business value associated with quick damage limitation, in addition to threat prevention and blocking," said Lawrence Pingree, research director at Gartner.

"The key enabler for CISOs in this endeavor is to get visibility across their security infrastructure to make better decisions during security incidents. This visibility will enable them to have a more strategic and risk-based conversation with their board of directors, CFO and CEO about the direction of their security program."

This trend will also go hand-in-hand with businesses changing their security strategy from prevention-only to detection and response. This has allowed new sub-sectors to emerge, including deception, endpoint detection and response (EDR), software-defined segmentation, cloud access security brokers (CASBs), and user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA).

Although these aspects of security are contributing to the growth of the overall security market, they are causing to the data security, enterprise protection platform (EPP) network security and security information and event management (SIEM) sectors to contract.

"The shift to detection and response approaches spans people, process and technology elements and will drive a majority of security market growth over the next five years," said Sid Deshpande, principal research analyst at Gartner.

"While this does not mean that prevention is unimportant or that chief information security officers (CISOs) are giving up on preventing security incidents, it sends a clear message that prevention is futile unless it is tied into a detection and response capability."