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Regional security spending set to increase 14% in 2025

The adoption of AI and generative AI continue to increase investments

End-user spending on information security in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region is forecast to total $3.2 billion in 2025, an increase of 14 per cent year on year, research shows.

This year, the figures is expected to be around $28.4 billion, 13.4 per cent higher than last year, Gartner data shows.

“The continued growth in security spending in the Mena region is primarily driven by the constantly evolving regulatory environment and the rise in cyberattacks,” said Shailendra Upadhyay, senior research principal at Gartner. “Furthermore, digitalisation and cloud migration are broadening the threat landscape for enterprises. Consequently, CISOs in the region are focusing on ensuring compliance with rapidly changing regulatory and privacy frameworks, countering persistent threats as well as addressing C-suite and board-level executives concerns on organisational resilience and cybersecurity posture.”

Worldwide end-user spending on information security is projected to total $212 billion in 2025, an increase of 15.1 per cent from 2024, according to the Gartner forecast. In 2024, global information security end-user spending is estimated to reach $183.9 billion.

“The continued heightened threat environment, cloud movement and talent crunch are pushing security to the top of the priorities list and pressing chief information security officers (CISOs) to increase their organisation’s security spend,” said Upadhyay. “Furthermore, organisations are currently assessing their endpoint protection platform (EPP) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) needs and making adjustments to boost their operational resilience and incident response following the CrowdStrike outage.”

The adoption of AI and generative AI (GenAI) continue to increase investments in security software markets like application security, data security and privacy, and infrastructure protection. Through 2025, GenAI will trigger a spike in the cybersecurity resources required to secure it, leading to an expected 15 per cent increase on security software spending (see Table 1).

Since the release of GenAI, attackers are increasingly employing tools along with large language models (LLMs) to carry out large-scale social engineering attacks, and Gartner predicts that by 2027, 17 per cent of total cyberattacks/data leaks will involve generative AI.

As organisations continue to move to the cloud, Gartner analysts expect an increase in cloud security solutions, and the market share of cloud-native solutions will grow. The combined cloud access security brokers (CASB) and cloud workload protection platforms (CWPP) market is estimated to reach $8.7 billion in 2025, up from forecasted $6.7 billion in 2024.

The global skills shortage in the cybersecurity industry is a major factor driving investment in the security services market (security consulting services, security professional services and managed security services) which is expected to grow faster than the other security segments.