Cybersecurity Technology Investment Trends for a Resilient Business

December 16, 2024

The escalating frequency of cyberattacks has compelled organizations to strengthen their incident response preparedness. Given the financial and operational ramifications of cyberattacks, organizations are continuing to invest in cybersecurity tools and technologies. This blog post highlights specific spending trends that Optiv’s Strategy and Risk Management team observed in our assessments and interviews with over 300 clients between January 2023 and July 2024, in addition to our survey of 650+ IT and cybersecurity professionals in Optiv and Ponemon’s 2024 Cybersecurity Threat and Risk Management Report.

Growing Trends in the Cybersecurity Technology Investments across Industries

According to Optiv and Ponemon’s report, nearly 60% of respondents surveyed indicated an increase in their budget allocations to cybersecurity investments in 2024. Diving deeper into our internal research on client investments, we observed that spending on security operations technologies increased significantly by 105% for organizations across industries. Moreover, when asked which cybersecurity activities that organizations considered to be the most important to threat and risk management, 51% of Optiv and Ponemon’s survey respondents prioritized consuming and applying threat intelligence, while 45% prioritized managing endpoints and mobile devices. 58% of respondents also indicated that their organization had deployed endpoint antivirus (AV) and antimalware (AM). Based on this data, we believe that we will continue to see investments in real-time threat intelligence and endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools to accelerate the speed and quality of detection, response and recovery efforts.

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Protecting the Network

Our client reporting further illustrates a 33% increase in security budget allocations to network security tools and technologies. This statistic aligns with what we found in Optiv and Ponemon’s report: when asked which technologies their organizations deployed, the majority of respondents (58%) deployed network firewalls (including NGFWs) and intrusion detection/prevention (IDS/IPS). Furthermore, the graph below based on our internal research reveals that network security investments account for 75% of overall security technology spending for the government and public sector industry, followed by 40% in energy and utilities, 39% in financials, 32% in consumers and 23% in industrials. Considering the fact that distributed denial of service (DDoS) continues to be a top threat for these industries, and individuals globally rely on the services provided by these industries in order to have reliable access to emergency services, medical care, critical infrastructure and utilities, banking services and more, we estimate that network security investments will remain a priority for organizations in the next 12 months.

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Analysis of Top Cyber Investments

The vigilant healthcare industry: The heightened risk of data breaches targeting the healthcare industry, coupled with increased digitization efforts, the growing cyber threat landscape and the imperative to uphold reputation and patient trust, the healthcare industry has invested more in identity and access management (IAM) tools for protecting critical health information. According to our internal research, the healthcare industry has increased the spending on IAM technologies by 161% in 2023 as compared to 2022.

Incident response tools and technologies remains the top priority for the industrials and energy and utilities industries: The industrials and energy and utilities industries rely heavily on operational technology (OT) systems to manage critical processes such as heavy machinery production and manufacturing. Disruptions or downtime to these critical processes resulting from cyber incidents could have significant financial and operational consequences. The increasing frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks, coupled with regulatory requirements and the need to protect critical operations, has led these industries to increase the investment on Incident response tools and technologies in 2023, with an aim to minimize the impact of these disruptions and have quicker recovery capabilities from security incidents.

Crucial role of secure messaging technologies in the financials industry: As financial services continue to embrace digital transformation, secure messaging has become essential in maintaining secure interactions with customers and partners. Along with the benefits of embracing new technologies comes the increased risk of exposure to added weaknesses that can be exploited by bad actors. In 2023 and early 2024, organizations in the financials industry spent more on secure messaging technologies, accounting for roughly 16% of all tools and technology spending. These investments help financial organizations add more layers of privacy and security, which is necessary when exchanging sensitive personal or transactional information and lowers the risk of identity theft and scams.

What’s Next?

With the increasing reliance on third-party vendors, we are foreseeing an enhanced focus on supply chain security. Organizations will adopt more third-party risk management tools and practices to strengthen hardware and software supply chains. Continuous monitoring and automated risk assessments will become a standard practice to mitigate risks associated with supply chain vulnerabilities. Increased adoption of software bill of materials (SBOM) technologies in the private sector will increase robustness of software supply chain.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will continue to play a crucial role in enhancing cybersecurity capabilities. Organizations will likely spend more on these technologies in the coming years to automate threat detection, response and remediation processes, allowing security teams to focus on more complex tasks and strategic initiatives. Technologies that provide capabilities to perform AI-driven security analytics will help in predicting and mitigating future threats.