“Worldwide spending on information security products and services will reach more than $114 billion in 2018, an increase of 12.4 percent from last year, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. In 2019, the market is forecast to grow 8.7 percent to $124 billion.”

That’s good, right? Well maybe-not-so-much. The current dystopian cyber-crime landscape paints a very dismal picture of the effectiveness of that spending, given the following predictions:

• Cybercrime will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021, up from $3 trillion in 2015.
• There will be 3.5 million cybersecurity job openings by 2021.
• There will be more than 26 billion global IP networked devices or connections by 2020 (up from 16.3 billion in 2015).

So to summarize the predictions, despite the increase in cyber security spending, cyber criminals will double their take from company revenue in two years, there will be a huge shortage of cyber defenders and the attack surface the bad guys have to work with will add another 10 billion devices. When vendors remark their product is evolving to meet the threats of tomorrow, I would counter with “Not. Fast. Enough.”

The cybercrime issue is not necessarily without hope, but hope comes in the form of a security revolution and a new metaphorical “reign of terror” against:

On Premises & Hybrid IT

Cisco provides some predictions on where IT systems will be found by 2021, suggesting 94 percent of workloads and computing instances will be processed by cloud data centers; six percent will be processed by traditional data centers. Building your own data center seems like a not-so-great idea.

Seventy-five percent of the total cloud workloads and computing instances will be Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), up from 71 percent in 2016. The slow death of client-server on premise applications (Read more...)