Security costs since 2011, in today´s money
Dec 23rd, 2022 by Jesper Kråkhede
A question that comes up every budget season: How much more do we spend on security today than ten years ago? Let´s look at the market as a whole.
The first comparable figure I can find from Gartner is for 2011, when worldwide spending on security was estimated at 55 billion US dollars. For 2022 Gartner estimates about 169 billion dollars. The definitions are not exactly the same, but close enough for the big picture.
Let´s make it fair. Adjusted for inflation, 55 billion dollars in 2011 is about 72 billion in 2022 dollars. Converted to euro at the average 2022 exchange rate, that is roughly 68 billion euro in 2011, compared with roughly 161 billion euro in 2022.
So in today´s money, the world spends about 2.4 times as much on security as eleven years ago. Not counting inflation, it is about three times as much.
Is that strange? Not really, if you remember my post on faster cars needing better brakes. We have moved to the cloud, we work from anywhere, and attackers have turned ransomware into an industry.
The question for management is not if we spend more, but if we spend it right. More than doubled spending hasn´t reduced the number of incidents. Much of the money goes into tools that are never fully used.
Before you add to the budget, make sure you get full value from what you already pay for.