Gartner says frontier AI turns patch speed into a vanity metric. Spending bars show the exposure-focused categories in Gartner’s 3Q26 security forecast. Click any chart to open it full size. Sources: Gartner (G00859901, Aug. 6, 2026; G00862059, Sept. 24, 2026), analysis by softwarestrategiesblog.com.
Gartner’s new research on frontier AI vulnerability management says the patch-speed metric most security teams report to their boards no longer measures anything useful.
Gartner analysts Rob McMillan and Alex Michaels put it bluntly in a research note published August 6: “Measuring ‘how fast we patch’ is a vanity metric; the only metric that matters now is ‘tolerable exposure time.'”
The note covers one of Gartner’s nine top cybersecurity trends for 2026: frontier AI models transforming vulnerability management. Its central argument runs against most vendor messaging. The real shock from frontier AI is not faster attackers. It is the volume of vulnerabilities that vendors and open-source projects will now find in their own code, and the flood of urgent updates that follows.
Gartner calls it a supply side shock, one that “permanently breaks traditional volume-based patching processes.”
The bars in the hero chart show 2026 and 2030 end-user spending for four exposure-focused categories. Six tiles underneath summarize the note’s core findings.
Why frontier AI breaks volume-based vulnerability management
Gartner is direct about where the pressure comes from. Frontier models can compress attacker cycle times by automating reconnaissance and payload iteration, the analysts write, but “attackers have historically always been faster than defenders.”
The change is on the supply side. As vendors and open-source projects use AI to uncover latent flaws, organizations “will face a greatly heightened volume of urgent security updates.” The note expects those updates to arrive in multiple waves, timed in large part to when new security-focused frontier models become available to IT suppliers.
The exploit window is shrinking at the same time. Gartner says the gap between vulnerability disclosure and active exploitation “has collapsed to minutes because AI models can autonomously reverse-engineer patches into exploits.”
Gartner’s four core insights:
Traditional vulnerability management was already misaligned with attacker timelines before AI. Without change, the gap is now unbridgeable.
Mandates to “patch everything faster” move risk from successful attacks to operational outages and increase self-inflicted downtime.
The bottleneck is testing and change management, not patching capacity. Each wave of AI-discovered vulnerabilities adds complexity and strains resources.
Regulatory pressure for rapid patching can conflict with operational reality. Storytelling about real business impact becomes a necessary skill.
“Patch everything faster” moves the risk, it doesn’t remove it
The note treats blanket speed mandates as a risk transfer. Unrealistic demands to patch everything immediately “merely transfer the risk from malicious actors to insufficient IT testing, increasing the likelihood of self-inflicted downtime.”
Gartner frames enterprise risk management as an explicit choice between breach risk and outage risk. The CISO, infrastructure and operations leaders and other stakeholders need business leaders to formally accept the relative risks of patching-related downtime against attack-related downtime.
Faster patching still helps at the margins. The note says the gains are capped by maintenance windows, the need for bespoke fixes in complex software stacks and other constraints.
From volume SLAs to exposure SLAs
Gartner’s replacement is a shift from volume-based patching service-level agreements to exposure-based ones.
What Gartner says breaks under AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery, and what replaces it. Source: Gartner (G00859901, Aug. 6, 2026), layout by softwarestrategiesblog.com.
Static vulnerability characteristics, including CVSS scores and scanning results, are “still necessary, but it is no longer sufficient for prioritization of remedies,” the note says. Prioritization must rest on real exploitability and business context.
Gartner wants the most urgent vulnerabilities, “not necessarily the highest impact,” first in the queue, and mitigated within the organization’s maximum tolerable exposure time.
Accountability moves too. Product and platform teams are held to their exposure limits, with the flexibility to use virtual patching or network isolation when change management blocks an immediate code fix.
CTEM becomes the operating model
Gartner tells organizations to abandon volume-based patching and adopt continuous threat exposure management, or CTEM. Its five stages run from scoping and discovery through prioritization, validation and mobilization.
Gartner’s CTEM cycle with stage notes drawn from the frontier AI research note. Source: Gartner (G00859901, Aug. 6, 2026), analysis by softwarestrategiesblog.com.
The note warns that “a failure to shift to a CTEM approach will result in continued patch deferral and therefore a slow but continuing escalation in risk profile.” Update complexity, and the time and collaboration needed to remediate, is likely to rise with each wave.
Gartner’s broader information security forecast points the same direction. Its 3Q26 report expects organizations to shift from reactive defense toward CTEM, with AI assistants automating event triage, false-positive reduction and code remediation.
The spending signal in Gartner’s security forecast
The categories that support exposure-based prioritization grow faster than the security market overall. Gartner’s 3Q26 forecast puts total information security spending at $247.5 billion in 2026 and $372.8 billion by 2030, a 10.8% CAGR in constant currency from 2025.
Category
2026
2030
2025-2030 CAGR
Threat intelligence
$3.1B
$6.1B
19.0%
Network detection and response
$2.6B
$4.1B
12.4%
Vulnerability assessment
$4.1B
$6.4B
12.0%
Managed security operations
$15.6B
$22.7B
+$7.0B added
Total information security
$247.5B
$372.8B
10.8%
End-user spending in current U.S. dollars; CAGRs in constant currency. Source: Gartner G00862059 (September 2026).
The note uses the AI-driven update surge to force a decision most organizations defer. Technical debt “generally falls into the ‘we will take care of it later’ bucket,” the analysts write. “‘Later’ must be ‘now.'”
CISOs guide the prioritization. CIOs, enterprise architecture and I&O teams have to execute the remediation in the short to medium term. Technical debt also appears separately in Gartner’s 2026 trends list, where it undermines organizational AI ambitions.
Use agentic application security testing selectively
Gartner recommends agentic application security testing, or AAST, for mission-critical applications. AAST can uncover business-logic vulnerabilities and multistep exploits by using context windows to reason through application logic.
The note pairs its reachability analysis, vulnerability prioritization and automated code remediation as the way to keep pace with AI-driven discovery volume.
There is a budget catch. Token consumption “is likely to drive an increase in application security budgets that many organizations will struggle to absorb under current assumptions.” Gartner’s advice is to use AAST selectively now and plan for the budget impact later.
Regulators want counts, CISOs need a story
Gartner says regulators, including the ECB and ESRB, already demand mitigation plans for systemic cyber risks caused by AI. One Gartner client reported pressure from a regulator to address a set number of vulnerabilities within 30 days.
The analysts read that as regulators not always understanding that a more surgical approach is sometimes needed “in order that one problem isn’t substituted for a worse problem.” In the short term, organizations may have to comply with both approaches in parallel.
Gartner expects regulation of AI in critical business processes to tighten. Third-party contracts will likely need vendors to disclose AI model usage and set contingencies for provider outages. Some frontier models may also face export controls or tighter access restrictions. The note cites Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 in 2026 as examples and advises building model-independent roadmaps.
Board talking points Gartner gives CISOs
Gartner’s Figure 1 gives CISOs three talking points for boards worried about Mythos, Daybreak and frontier AI risk:
Foundational controls. Threat actors must still chain attacks. Core controls still provide adequate protection against advanced threats.
Prioritization. A vulnerability does not equal exploitability. Environmental constraints, required privileges and mitigating controls make many flaws impractical to exploit.
Accelerator. Defensive AI scales the defender’s advantage through automated code analysis, threat intelligence and incident response.
The strategic shift, in Gartner’s words, is from asking “how fast do we patch?” to asking “what is our tolerance for remaining exposed to a known vulnerability?”
Where this sits in Gartner’s 2026 trends
Gartner groups its top cybersecurity trends for 2026 into three themes: secure new frontiers, transform governance and normalize AI adoption. Frontier AI and vulnerability management sits under normalizing AI adoption, alongside AI-driven SOC solutions and the breakdown of traditional security awareness tactics.
Gartner’s top cybersecurity trends for 2026 by theme. Source: Gartner (G00859901, Aug. 6, 2026), layout by softwarestrategiesblog.com.
What security leaders should do now
Retire volume-based patch SLAs. Replace them with exposure-based SLAs tied to maximum tolerable exposure time, and adopt CTEM.
Get formal risk acceptance. Have business leaders sign off on the tradeoff between patch-related downtime and attack-related downtime.
Fund testing and change management. That is the bottleneck Gartner identifies, not patch deployment.
Pay down technical debt now. Each AI-driven update wave makes legacy remediation harder.
Pilot AAST on mission-critical apps. Budget for token costs before scaling it.
Build model-independent AI roadmaps. Plan for export controls, access limits and provider outages.
Frequently asked questions
What does Gartner say about frontier AI and vulnerability management? Gartner says frontier AI is driving an unprecedented volume of vulnerability discoveries that makes volume-driven patching obsolete. It recommends exposure-based SLAs and continuous threat exposure management.
What is tolerable exposure time? Gartner defines the meaningful metric as how long critical vulnerabilities remain unmitigated, measured against the organization’s maximum tolerable exposure time.
Why not just patch faster? Gartner says blanket faster-patching mandates shift risk from attacks to self-inflicted outages, because testing and change management are the real bottleneck.
What is AAST? Agentic application security testing uses AI agents to find business-logic flaws and multistep exploits. Gartner recommends using it selectively because token consumption raises application security costs.
How I built this analysis
Quotes and recommendations come from Gartner’s research note G00859901, published August 6, 2026, as part of its Top Trends in Cybersecurity, 2H26 research. Category spending and CAGRs come from Gartner’s 3Q26 information security forecast (G00862059). The pairing of the two documents, the comparison table and the CTEM stage notes are my analysis.
Security spending climbs to $372.8B by 2030, and post-quantum firewall refreshes drew the only upgrade. Click any chart to open it full size. Source: Gartner (G00862059, Sept. 24, 2026), analysis by softwarestrategiesblog.com.
The 3Q26 Gartner information security forecast raised exactly one growth rate.
Gartner now projects firewall equipment spending to grow 13.4% in 2027 in constant currency, up from the 7.8% in its June forecast. Network security equipment overall rises to 12.8% from 8.7%. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is the cause. Many installed firewalls can’t run the new algorithms, which forces early replacement.
Every other business category in the 41-category forecast kept the constant-currency outlook it had 91 days earlier.
Published September 24, the forecast puts worldwide end-user spending at $247.5 billion in 2026, up 13.6% in current U.S. dollars and 12.7% in constant currency.
Spending reaches $372.8 billion by 2030. Gartner frames that as $373 billion and a 10.8% compound annual growth rate in constant currency from 2025 through 2030.
I built this analysis from Gartner’s 3Q26 report (G00862059), the full detailed dataset of 13,489 rows covering 47 countries, 9 regions, 41 categories and 7 years, and a line-by-line comparison against the 2Q26 file Gartner released in June (G00855892).
Each bar in the hero chart stacks four parts of Gartner’s forecast in current U.S. dollars. Navy is business security software, mid-blue is security services, sky blue is network security and light blue is consumer security software. Bold figures above the bars give each year’s total, with Gartner’s constant-currency growth rate in italics.
Six tiles underneath carry the 2026 and 2030 totals, the $125.4 billion in new spending between 2026 and 2030, the 2030 firewall revision in constant currency, the change in Gartner’s 2027 firewall growth forecast and the securing AI trajectory.
Both the 56% software share and the $80.5 billion software tile include consumer security software.
Gartner information security forecast puts 2026 at $247.5B and 2030 at $372.8B
Gartner splits the market into security software, security services and network security. Software keeps gaining share in every year of the forecast.
Each column in the chart below adds to 100% of total spending. Navy is security software, including consumer. Mid-blue is security services and sky blue is network security.
A panel on the right lists each market’s 2024 and 2030 spending and share. I calculated the shares from Gartner’s current-dollar figures.
Share of worldwide information security spending by market, 2024 to 2030, current U.S. dollars. Data from Gartner G00862059 (September 2026). Shares calculated by softwarestrategiesblog.com.
Total market 2026. $247.5 billion, up $29.7 billion from $217.7 billion in 2025.
Security software 2026. $126.9 billion including $9.0 billion of consumer security software. Software reaches $207.4 billion by 2030, 55.6% of all spending, up from 49.6% in 2024.
Security services 2026. $93.5 billion. Services reach $125.4 billion by 2030, but their share falls from 39.3% in 2024 to 33.6%. Constant-currency CAGR is 7.5%, the slowest of the three markets.
Network security 2026. $27.0 billion, growing 15.0% in constant currency. It reaches $40.0 billion by 2030. Gartner raised the 2025 to 2030 CAGR for this market to 10.9%, up from 9.8% in 2Q26.
2026 to 2030 net new spending. $125.4 billion. Security software captures $80.5 billion of it, or 64%. Services add $31.9 billion. Network security adds $13.0 billion.
Gartner’s near-term call is unchanged from June. Growth slows to 11.2% in 2027 in constant currency, then decelerates to 9.6% by 2030.
Gartner names security service edge (SSE), cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs), cloud security posture management, cloud access security brokers, web application firewalls, encryption and enterprise data loss prevention as the areas where 2027 budgets will grow.
It also expects AI trust, risk and security management (AI TRiSM) adoption to rise as generative AI use widens data, application and governance risk.
Post-quantum firewall refreshes drew the only growth upgrade
Gartner’s revision table compares 3Q26 against 2Q26 for all 11 subsegments. Ten of them show 0.0% growth-rate change in every year from 2026 through 2030. Network security equipment is the exception, at +4.1 points in 2027, +1.1 in 2028, +0.4 in 2029 and -0.2 in 2030.
I ran the same comparison across all 41 categories in the detailed files. In constant currency, firewall equipment is the only category Gartner raised.
It gains $1.08 billion in 2027, $1.50 billion in 2028, $1.77 billion in 2029 and $1.84 billion in 2030. The other 40 categories, including consumer security software, match the June file to the dollar in constant currency.
In the chart below, each bar is the firewall equipment increase in constant currency. Because no other category moved, the bars are also the net change for the whole market. The total is unchanged in 2025 and 2026 and turns positive in 2027, when the firewall upgrade starts.
3Q26 vs. 2Q26 revisions by year in constant currency. Firewall equipment is the only category Gartner raised; the other 40 are unchanged. Data from Gartner G00862059 and G00855892. Revision math by softwarestrategiesblog.com.
Gartner states the cause directly. “Postquantum cryptography (PQC) requirements will drive premature hardware refreshes, initially among government, financial and defense organizations, due to the inability of many existing firewalls to support the processing demands and crypto-agility required through software or firmware updates,” the report says.
Gartner’s timing is specific. The report says “selected products may support algorithms such as FIPS 203/ML-KEM by late 2026.” Broader vendor availability follows in 2027. By 2028, Gartner expects every major firewall vendor to offer PQC-capable platforms.
Gartner expects at least 20% of customers in government, financial services and defense to upgrade in 2027, rising to more than 30% in 2028.
Firewall equipment spending and year-over-year growth, 2Q26 vs. 3Q26 forecasts, constant currency. Data from Gartner G00862059 and G00855892. Chart by softwarestrategiesblog.com.
In the top panel, the chart compares firewall equipment spending in Gartner’s 2Q26 forecast (light blue) with 3Q26 (sky blue), in constant currency. Revised values carry dark-blue labels and the 2027 and 2030 increases are marked above the bars.
Year-over-year growth sits in the bottom panel, with June’s forecast dashed and September’s solid. Both lines match through 2026, split in 2027 and converge by 2030.
That shift shows up in one year. In June, Gartner expected firewall equipment growth to fall from 16.1% in 2026 to 7.8% in 2027. Now 2027 growth holds at 13.4%.
Gartner’s revision lifts the 2027 firewall market from $20.8 billion to $21.9 billion in constant currency, and the 2030 market from $25.7 billion to $27.6 billion.
In current dollars firewall equipment reaches $28.6 billion by 2030, still the largest network security category by a wide margin.
Every region gets the upgrade at nearly the same rate. Each region’s 2030 firewall forecast rose between 6.9% and 7.8%. North America takes $834 million of the $1.84 billion. Europe takes $414 million. Together they account for 68%.
Each bar in the next chart is one region’s 2030 firewall revision in constant currency. The label shows the dollar increase, that region’s share of the $1.84 billion total and its revised 2030 firewall market. Sky-blue bars mark North America and Europe. Lighter bars are the other seven regions.
2030 firewall equipment revision by region, 3Q26 vs. 2Q26, constant currency. Data from Gartner G00862059 and G00855892. Revision math by softwarestrategiesblog.com.
Why a firmware update will not close the gap
Gartner’s argument rests on hardware. Many installed firewalls cannot meet PQC processing and crypto-agility demands through software or firmware updates. The engineering behind that is straightforward. ML-KEM public keys and ciphertexts are larger than the elliptic-curve exchanges they replace, and hybrid key exchange runs both algorithms in the same handshake.
A firewall that inspects encrypted traffic at line rate has to absorb that overhead on every session.
Federal policy points the same way. The National Security Agency’s CNSA 2.0 guidance says traditional networking equipment such as VPNs and routers should “support and prefer CNSA 2.0 by 2026, and exclusively use CNSA 2.0 by 2030.”
According to Keyfactor’s summary of the federal timeline, new National Security System acquisitions are expected to be CNSA 2.0-compliant by default from January 1, 2027, and NIST IR 8547 proposes deprecating RSA, ECDSA, EdDSA and Diffie-Hellman at the 112-bit security level after 2030, with disallowance in 2035.
Vendor roadmaps line up with Gartner’s 2027 inflection. Cisco’s Secure Firewall PQC roadmap targets ML-KEM support in Secure Firewall Threat Defense 10.5 and ASA 9.25 for general availability in late 2026.
ML-DSA signature support is planned for FTD/ASA 11.0 in the second half of 2027, and SLH-DSA support is also planned for 11.0.
Gartner names the sectors with procurement mandates first. That is why the revision lands in 2027 and fades by 2030. Gartner models the refresh as a pull-forward, with 2030 growth now slightly below the June forecast at 6.8% versus 7.0%.
After two increases, the 2026 number dips
I have tracked Gartner’s 2026 security number through four quarterly updates. The 4Q25 update projected $244.2 billion. 1Q26 raised it to $246.2 billion. 2Q26 raised it again to $248.2 billion. 3Q26 is the first update in that run to come in lower, at $247.5 billion.
Gartner’s 2026 worldwide information security spending as published in each quarterly update, current U.S. dollars. Data from Gartner 4Q25, 1Q26, 2Q26 (G00855892) and 3Q26 (G00862059) forecasts. The y-axis starts at $240 billion to make the revisions visible.
Each bar in the chart above is the 2026 total as published in one quarterly update. The labels inside the bars show the change from the previous update, at +$2.0 billion, +$2.0 billion and -$0.8 billion.
An axis starting at $240 billion keeps the revisions visible. All four estimates sit within 2% of each other.
The entire $788 million drop is currency, not lower demand. Gartner’s revision table puts the 2026 change at -$788 million in current dollars, with 0.0% change in every 2026 growth rate. In the detailed files, the 2026 total is unchanged in constant currency.
Japan shows the currency effect most clearly. Its 2030 forecast is $1.37 billion lower in current dollars than in June, yet $49 million higher in constant currency, all of it from the firewall increase.
Gartner’s notes flag exchange-rate volatility, Strait of Hormuz disruption expected to continue into 2027, energy prices more than 50% above pre-war levels and the risk that inflation and rising interest rates erode business confidence.
Gartner expects the conflict’s main near-term effect on IT spending to be a rebalancing of sourcing, vendor relationships and regional exposure rather than a material cut.
Where the $125.4 billion in new spending goes
Growth rates show where momentum is. Dollar additions show where budgets actually move. Fifteen of the 41 categories capture 76% of all new spending between 2026 and 2030.
Bars in the next chart show the dollars each of the 15 largest categories adds between 2026 and 2030, colored by market. The indigo line, read on the right axis, is the cumulative share of the $125.4 billion total.
It reaches 15% with the first category, 46% after five, 65% after ten and 76% after fifteen.
Net new spending added between 2026 and 2030 by category, current U.S. dollars, with cumulative share. Data from Gartner G00862059. Dollar additions and shares calculated by softwarestrategiesblog.com.
Other security software, including securing AI. +$19.2 billion, from $18.3 billion to $37.5 billion. The largest single dollar gain in the forecast.
Cloud security posture management. +$9.8 billion, from $6.3 billion to $16.1 billion.
Firewall equipment. +$8.8 billion, from $19.7 billion to $28.6 billion. Post-quantum refreshes make firewalls the fourth-largest source of new dollars, ahead of cloud workload protection.
Cloud workload protection platforms. +$8.2 billion, from $7.5 billion to $15.7 billion.
Managed security operations. +$7.0 billion, from $15.6 billion to $22.7 billion. The largest services gain.
Five categories alone account for $57.8 billion, or 46% of new spending. Three of them sit in cloud security or in other security software, where Gartner counts securing AI. Endpoint protection and the firewall, a category many security leaders had written off as a replacement-cycle business, make up the other two.
The 10 fastest-growing categories through 2030
Ranked by 2025 to 2030 CAGR in constant currency, cloud security takes the top three spots. Gartner’s cloud security subsegment grows from $16.6 billion in 2026 to $38.4 billion by 2030, a 24.1% CAGR and the fastest of the 11 subsegments.
In the chart, bar length is each category’s 2025 to 2030 CAGR in constant currency. The label gives the CAGR and the category’s 2026 and 2030 market size in current dollars.
Navy marks security software and sky blue marks network security. The dashed line is the 10.8% market CAGR, so every bar crosses it by at least 1.2 points.
Top 10 of 41 categories by 2025-2030 CAGR in constant currency, with 2026 and 2030 market sizes in current U.S. dollars. Data from Gartner G00862059. Ranking by softwarestrategiesblog.com.
Cloud security posture management. 27.6% CAGR. $6.3 billion in 2026 to $16.1 billion in 2030.
Cloud access security brokers. 24.3%. $2.8 billion to $6.5 billion.
Cloud workload protection platforms. 21.0%. $7.5 billion to $15.7 billion.
Zero trust network access. 20.9%. $3.0 billion to $6.4 billion. The fastest-growing network security category.
Threat intelligence. 19.0%. $3.1 billion to $6.1 billion.
Consent and preference management. 18.6%. $1.0 billion to $2.0 billion.
Other security software, including securing AI. 18.5%. $18.3 billion to $37.5 billion.
Network detection and response. 12.4%. $2.6 billion to $4.1 billion.
Subject rights request automation. 12.3%. $1.5 billion to $2.3 billion.
Vulnerability assessment. 12.0%. $4.1 billion to $6.4 billion.
Gartner’s own opportunity map plots the 11 subsegments on two axes. The horizontal axis is the 2025 to 2030 CAGR. The vertical axis is dollars added over the same period. Bubble size is the 2030 market. The dashed vertical line marks the overall 10.8% CAGR.
Cloud security and other security software sit alone on the right, the only two subsegments growing faster than 15%. Infrastructure protection is the largest subsegment at $62.7 billion by 2030 and adds the most dollars, about $26 billion, while growing at the market average.
Figure 1: Information Security Market Opportunities, 2030 Segment Forecast. Source: Gartner, G00862059 (September 2026). Original figure by Gartner. Commentary and independent analysis by softwarestrategiesblog.com. Please click to expand.
Securing AI becomes the largest line item in 2029
Gartner places securing AI inside other security software. The report sizes the market for securing AI ecosystems and AI agents at $3 billion in 2026 and $16 billion by 2030, citing its companion analysis, Forecasting the $16.4 Billion Opportunity in Securing AI.
That makes securing AI about 16% of the other security software category in 2026 and about 43% by 2030, by my calculation.
Of the $19.2 billion the category adds over the period, roughly $13 billion comes from securing AI. The rest of the category grows from about $15.3 billion to about $21.5 billion.
Other security software is also the only category whose growth accelerates every year of the forecast, from 16.3% in 2026 to 20.1% in 2030 in constant currency. It passes enterprise endpoint protection in 2029, $31.1 billion against $30.1 billion, and finishes 2030 at $37.5 billion against $32.9 billion.
By 2030 securing AI alone, at $16 billion, is roughly the size of cloud security posture management ($16.1 billion), managed detection and response ($15.7 billion) or cloud workload protection ($15.7 billion), and larger than SIEM ($11.2 billion).
Gartner’s second AI number is larger. Gartner’s AI-amplified security forecast projects AI-amplified security, meaning existing security products with AI built in, rising from $49 billion in 2026 to $204 billion by 2030.
Each bar in the next chart equals Gartner’s 3Q26 total for that year. The navy segment is Gartner’s AI-amplified security spending. The light-blue segment is everything else in the information security market, calculated by subtracting AI-amplified spending from the total.
Each segment shows its dollars and its share of that year’s total. The indigo note repeats Gartner’s securing AI figures, which sit inside other security software rather than in the AI-amplified total.
Everything else, the light-blue segment, shrinks from $182.9 billion (95%) in 2024 to $168.4 billion (45%) in 2030, even as the total nearly doubles.
AI-amplified security spending as a share of total information security spending, 2024 to 2030. Data from Gartner, Forecast Analysis: AI-Amplified Security, Worldwide, 2026 (August 2026) and Gartner G00862059 (September 2026). The share combines two Gartner forecasts and is an illustrative softwarestrategiesblog.com calculation, not a Gartner-published ratio.
Set against the 3Q26 totals, AI-amplified spending rises from 20% of the market in 2026 to 39% in 2028, 47% in 2029 and 55% in 2030. Treat that as an illustration of direction, since the two forecasts were built separately.
By the end of the decade, most security dollars will buy products where AI does part of the detection, triage or response work.
Gartner’s report expects AI code security assistants and cybersecurity AI assistants to automate event triage, false-positive reduction and code remediation, and it expects organizations to shift from reactive defense toward continuous threat exposure management (CTEM).
North America is 53% of 2030 spending, and China grows fastest
On the left, the chart shows each region’s 2030 spending in current dollars and its share of the world total. On the right is each region’s 2025 to 2030 CAGR in constant currency. The dashed line marks the 10.8% world rate, and indigo marks China and Japan, the two fastest-growing regions.
2030 information security spending by region in current U.S. dollars and 2025-2030 CAGR in constant currency. Data from Gartner G00862059. Shares calculated by softwarestrategiesblog.com.
North America. $129.2 billion in 2026, 52.2% of the world. $197.7 billion by 2030, 53.0%. 11.4% CAGR. The United States alone reaches $181.1 billion in 2030.
Europe. $64.0 billion in 2026 to $91.3 billion by 2030. 8.6% CAGR, the slowest of the nine regions.
China. $10.7 billion in 2026, up 24.5% in current dollars. $18.7 billion by 2030. 15.4% CAGR, the fastest region.
Japan. $12.6 billion in 2026 to $22.2 billion by 2030. 13.1% CAGR, second fastest, with 17.6% constant-currency growth in 2026.
Emerging markets. Emerging Asia/Pacific grows at 11.1%, Sub-Saharan Africa at 10.5%, Latin America at 9.3%, and the Middle East and North Africa at 9.1%.
At the country level, China (16.2%), Indonesia (13.9%), Japan (13.1%) and Taiwan (12.4%) post the fastest constant-currency CAGRs among the 47 countries in the file.
All 41 categories, ranked
Growth rates spread wide across the full ranking. Seven categories grow faster than 18% a year. Twenty-nine grow below the 10.8% market rate. Two shrink.
Bars rank all 41 categories by 2025 to 2030 CAGR in constant currency. Each bar carries its CAGR, and the right-hand column lists the category’s 2030 market size in current dollars. Click the chart to open it full size.
Navy is security software, mid-blue is security services and sky blue is network security. Indigo marks the two shrinking categories, and a dashed line marks the 10.8% market rate.
All 41 information security categories ranked by 2025-2030 CAGR in constant currency, with 2030 market size in current U.S. dollars. Data from Gartner G00862059. Ranking by softwarestrategiesblog.com.
Network access control declines at a 17.7% CAGR, from $922 million in 2026 to $382 million in 2030. Intrusion detection and prevention systems fall at 8.3% a year, from $785 million to $548 million.
Both sit inside network security equipment, the same subsegment where firewalls, zero trust network access and network detection and response all grow. My read is that standalone network appliances are being absorbed into firewall platforms and ZTNA, which is consistent with Gartner’s comments on platform consolidation.
User authentication grows at 3.1%, the slowest positive rate in the forecast, while access management grows at 9.2% to $12.1 billion and identity governance and administration at 10.2% to $7.1 billion. My read is that identity spending is shifting from the login event to governing who and what holds access.
A reading note on Gartner’s Table 1
Readers working from the PDF of the Gartner information security forecast should check the growth columns in Table 1. For the last three rows, the growth rates appear offset by one row. The table shows 16.3% to 20.1% growth next to security consulting services and 9.0% to 5.6% next to other security software.
Gartner’s detailed dataset shows the reverse. Other security software accelerates from 16.3% to 20.1%, security consulting services slows from 9.6% to 5.0%, and security professional services slows from 9.0% to 5.6%. The dollar values in the table are correct. Every growth rate in this post comes from the detailed file.
What security leaders should do with this forecast
Inventory every firewall and VPN concentrator for PQC capability now. Gartner’s refresh window opens in 2027 for government, financial services and defense. Organizations that sell into those sectors, or connect to them, will face the same questions in their own procurement and supplier reviews. Ask vendors which appliance generations support ML-KEM in hardware at full inspection throughput, and get the answer in writing.
Budget the refresh as a 2027 and 2028 capital item. Gartner’s revision adds $1.08 billion to 2027 and another $0.43 billion in 2028, then only $0.26 billion and $0.07 billion more in 2029 and 2030. Waiting for 2029 means buying when lead times and pricing reflect peak demand.
Plan for securing AI as a line item, not a pilot. At $16 billion by 2030, securing AI will be comparable in size to CSPM and MDR. Governance gaps are already visible. Gartner’s first AI governance hype cycle found 34% of enterprises govern AI with policies they only partly follow, which I covered in Gartner’s 2026 AI Governance Hype Cycle.
Push cloud security consolidation. CSPM, CASB and CWPP are the three fastest-growing categories, and Gartner lists SSE and CNAPP adoption alongside tool consolidation and cost control as 2027 budget priorities. Consolidating onto those platforms is the most direct way to fund the growth without adding consoles and contracts.
Re-test services contracts against AI-assisted operations. Services share drops from 39.3% to 33.6% by 2030. Managed security operations still adds $7.0 billion, so outsourcing is not shrinking. What changes is the mix of human hours and AI triage inside each contract, and pricing should reflect it.
Frequently asked questions
How much will worldwide information security spending be in 2026? Gartner forecasts $247.5 billion in 2026, up 13.6% in current U.S. dollars and 12.7% in constant currency.
How big will the security market be by 2030? $372.8 billion, which Gartner frames as $373 billion and a 10.8% constant-currency CAGR from 2025 through 2030.
What changed in the 3Q26 Gartner information security forecast? Firewall equipment growth for 2027 rose to 13.4% from 7.8% in constant currency, driven by post-quantum firewall refreshes. Every other business category kept its constant-currency outlook from June.
Which security category grows fastest? Cloud security posture management, at a 27.6% CAGR from 2025 to 2030, reaching $16.1 billion.
How large is the securing AI market? Gartner sizes securing AI at $3 billion in 2026 and $16 billion by 2030, counted inside other security software.
How I built this analysis
All market sizes are Gartner end-user spending from the 3Q26 detailed forecast file (G00862059), in current U.S. dollars unless noted. All growth rates and CAGRs are constant currency, matching Gartner’s reporting convention, with 2024 as the constant-currency base year.
Revisions compare the 3Q26 and 2Q26 (G00855892) detailed files category by category in constant currency, which separates forecast changes from exchange-rate effects. Dollar additions, shares, rankings, regional splits and the AI-amplified ratio are my calculations.
Securing AI figures ($3 billion in 2026, $16 billion by 2030) are Gartner’s, as stated in the 3Q26 report. The AI-amplified figures come from Gartner’s August 2026 AI-amplified security forecast.
Growth multiple versus net-new dollars added, 2024 to 2030. The segment ranking inverts between the two measures.
Every chart and table in this analysis opens full size when you click it.
Security services inside Gartner’s AI-amplified security market were worth $364 million in 2024. Gartner now projects $59 billion by 2030. That is 162 times larger in six years, compounding at 133.5% annually, the steepest curve anywhere in the forecast. I have tracked this forecast through every quarterly update, and no segment has ever moved like this one.
What Is AI-Amplified Security?
Gartner’s term for the share of existing security spending flowing to products with AI built in. Endpoint protection, firewalls, identity, and network security that now embed AI-driven detection, autonomous remediation, and agent-based response. Not a new category. Existing budgets redirecting toward AI-native capabilities. The companion forecast for securing AI itself reaches $16.4 billion in 2030. Gartner publicly confirms the 75%-by-2028 adoption projection.
The share table and the dollar table tell different stories. Software’s share of this market falls from 87.1% to 61.3%, and services picks up almost every point software gives up. Read only that and you conclude software is losing. Run the arithmetic on net-new spending and software still collects $116.5 billion of the $194.4 billion the market adds between 2024 and 2030. That is 60 cents of every new dollar, and it puts software ahead of services 2 to 1 on net-new spending.
Both things are true at once, and the gap between them is where security budgets get set wrong.
The numbers come from Gartner’s Forecast Analysis: AI-Amplified Security, Worldwide, 2026 (G00846160, August 4, 2026) by Shailendra Upadhyay. It is the first time Gartner has split AI-amplified security into software, services, and network security across a full seven-year window. The totals reconcile cleanly with the 2Q26 AI spending forecast, which carried AI-amplified security at $204.5 billion in 2030 without breaking out the segments underneath it.
This is a slice of the security budget, not an addition to it
The note states plainly that AI-amplified security is a subset of the information security forecast and that the spending is not additive. It points readers to the 2Q26 information security forecast, the one where securing AI became the only accelerating segment, for the parent view.
Keep the two straight. AI-amplified security is AI defending the enterprise, and it reaches $204 billion by 2030. Securing AI is the enterprise defending its own models, pipelines, and agents, at $16.4 billion in the same year. Roughly twelve dollars of AI-powered defense for every dollar spent protecting the AI doing the defending.
Key findings
$204.5 billion by 2030, up from $10.0 billion in 2024. A 65.3% CAGR and 20.4x expansion. Gartner projects that by 2028, over 75% of enterprises will use AI-amplified cybersecurity products for most use cases, up from less than 25% in 2025. AI inside the product is table stakes, not a differentiator.
Security services grows from $364 million to $59.0 billion. Share climbs from 3.6% to 28.9%, absorbing 25.3 of the 25.8 points software gives up. The skills gap is the engine.
Security software reaches $125.3 billion and still wins the dollars. Share drops 25.8 points, but software adds $116.5 billion in net-new spending against services’ $58.7 billion. Services leads on rate and share. Software leads on absolute money.
Network security reaches $20.1 billion at a 66.8% CAGR. Its share dips to 8.3% in 2027 before recovering to 9.8% in 2030. Autonomous agents for network security operations are the catalyst.
The largest annual increment lands at the end. The market adds $14.3 billion in 2024-25 and $44.0 billion in 2029-30. Growth rates fall from 143% to 27% over the same span. Budget to increments, not rates.
72% of organizations already deploy AI with a third-party vendor. Only 27% rely primarily on internal resources, per Gartner’s 2025 AI Buying Behavior Survey of 556 respondents. That split is where the services forecast comes from.
Code analysis leads GenAI security adoption at 22% in production. Combined in-use and piloting reaches 52%. Threat hunting sits at 18% in use with the highest planning rate of any use case at 44%.
About one-third of network security tasks are automated today. Even fewer use AI. That gap is where the $20.1 billion network security forecast originates.
AI-amplified security by segment, 2024 to 2030.
Why services is the story, and where that story stops
Gartner’s 2025 AI Buying Behavior Survey quantifies the build-versus-buy split across 556 respondents. 57% deploy AI using both internal resources and third-party vendors. 27% rely primarily on internal resources. 15% go primarily through third-party vendors. Add the first and third and 72% of AI deployments already run through an outside partner.
Services did not grow 162x because buyers developed a taste for consultants. It grew because most organizations cannot staff the alternative. ISC2 measured a global cybersecurity workforce gap of 4.8 million professionals in its 2024 study, a gap that widened 19% year over year while the active workforce stayed flat. Gartner’s note describes service providers investing heavily to claim early leadership and running well ahead of their own clients in applying AI internally.
Here is the part the share chart hides. Software still captures 59.9% of all net-new spending in this market through 2030, against 30.2% for services and 9.9% for network security. A vendor reading the share decline as an exit signal would be misreading it. The software line is growing 14.3x in absolute terms while losing share to a segment growing from almost nothing.
Some CISOs will argue that services dependency creates lock-in they will pay for later. That argument is sound. It also lost. Gartner’s own numbers show in-house operation of AI security tooling has not scaled for the majority, and the 72% third-party figure is the receipt.
Growth rates decelerate while dollar increments keep climbing
Year-over-year growth falls from 142.7% in 2024-25 to 27.4% in 2029-30. That deceleration is normal for a market scaling from $10 billion to $204 billion. Services alone stays above 35% every year of the forecast, ending at 35.1% in 2029-30 after starting at 403%.
Year-over-year growth rate by segment.
Net-new dollars move the opposite direction. The market adds $14.3 billion in 2024-25, $38.0 billion in 2027-28, and $44.0 billion in 2029-30. Growth rates fall by four-fifths. Annual dollar increments triple. A business case anchored to “the market grows 143%” reads as broken by 2028. A business case anchored to “the market adds $38 billion that year” still holds.
Net new spending added per year, split by services versus software and network.
Look at the split inside those bars. In 2029-30, services contributes $15.4 billion of the $44.0 billion increment. Software and network contribute $28.7 billion. Even in the final year of the forecast, when services carries its highest share of the market, it is still the minority of new money.
The structural shift that defines this forecast
Software’s share falls 25.8 points across the forecast period. Services absorbs 25.3 of them. Network security ends roughly where it started, though not in a straight line, dipping to 8.3% in 2027 before recovering to 9.8% by 2030.
Segment share of the total AI-amplified security market.
The mechanism is staffing, not preference. Organizations bought AI security software intending to run it themselves. The services curve records what happened next. The $3.6 billion in venture funding flowing to agentic AI security startups confirms where the market believes the answer sits, and the acquisition wave underneath it says incumbents agree.
GenAI security adoption is broader than the in-use numbers suggest
Gartner’s 2025 Cybersecurity Innovations in AI Risk Management and Use Survey polled 302 cybersecurity leaders between March 21 and May 9, 2025. Fewer than 25% of organizations use GenAI for cybersecurity today. More than 60% are piloting or planning it. Gartner warns that without a clear strategy, many of these initiatives land as superficial implementations with high project turnover, driven by executive pressure rather than operational need.
Piloting is not aspiration. It means budget allocated, vendor selected, and a proof of concept running. Combine in-use and piloting and code analysis reaches 52%, user behavior analytics 51%, vulnerability detection 47%, and incident response 46%. The $204 billion endpoint assumes most of those pilots convert.
GenAI cybersecurity adoption by use case.
Threat hunting carries the highest planning rate in the survey at 44%, against 18% in production. No other use case has that much committed intent sitting ahead of deployment. When those budgets convert, threat hunting moves fastest in the next survey update.
Autonomous agents move from concept to production in network security
Human-centric operating models cannot absorb the scale, threat velocity, and traffic diversity that AI-driven workloads generate. Gartner describes AI-amplified network security agents that operate without predetermined workflows, adapt to security events nobody scripted, and handle threat detection, policy enforcement, and incident response while people supervise and validate rather than execute.
The trust curve is the constraint. By 2029, Gartner projects 10% of organizations will run autonomous agents with no human oversight for network security operations, up from less than 1% in 2026. Ten percent in three years is not a mass market. It is enough to reprice the segment, and the $20.1 billion forecast reflects that repricing. For how these agent numbers stack against other estimates, see my roundup of agentic AI forecasts and market estimates.
One number in the note worth checking before you quote it
Gartner’s note carries two different 2026 figures. The opening summary describes the market rising from $49 billion in 2026 to $204 billion by 2030. A later passage describes it reaching $204 billion in 2030, up from $81 billion in 2026. Table 1 puts 2026 at $48.5 billion and 2027 at $81.2 billion.
The table is the authority, and $49 billion is the number consistent with it. It also matches the $48.5 billion AI-amplified figure I reported in March from the prior forecast cycle. Anyone quoting $81 billion as a 2026 figure is quoting 2027.
What this forecast changes for CISOs and security vendors
Reassess build versus buy, then budget for both. The 72% third-party figure is an organizational verdict on in-house feasibility. Plan services into the operating model rather than bolting it on. Do not read the share shift as permission to stop buying software, because software still takes 60% of the new dollars.
Anchor business cases to dollar increments. The market adds $38.0 billion in 2027-28 and $44.0 billion in 2029-30. Those numbers stay correct. Growth percentages will look wrong inside two years.
Move on threat hunting next. It has the highest planning rate in Gartner’s survey at 44% against 18% in production. Organizations that move before the pipeline converts will have more mature detection models when it does.
Grade vendors on services delivery, not just features. A pure software licensing model captures a shrinking share of a growing market. Gartner’s note is direct about the consequence, warning that vendors who fail to operationalize AI for real-time threat detection and adaptive defense risk rapid obsolescence.
Start network security agent pilots now. Gartner projects 10% trusted autonomy by 2029. That leaves three budget cycles to build guardrails, validation workflows, and the evidence trail an auditor will ask for. Waiting until 2028 means arriving late with an unproven control set.
Watch the governance layer in parallel. Gartner’s first Hype Cycle for AI Governance puts most security-relevant governance capabilities two to five years from mainstream adoption, which is the same window in which these agents reach production.
Bottom line
I have tracked Gartner’s information security forecast through multiple quarterly updates. This is the first time the firm has published segment-level detail underneath AI-amplified security, and the segments say more than the total does. Traditional security spending is reorganizing around AI-native capability, and the delivery model is reorganizing with it.
Every CISO reading this should ask one question of their AI security strategy. Is it built around software licensing or around services delivery? The honest answer for most organizations is that it needs to be built around both, weighted differently than it is today. Services is where the growth rate lives. Software is where the money still goes.
The risk of getting this wrong is not theoretical. Forrester predicts an agentic AI deployment will cause a publicly disclosed data breach this year, leading to employee dismissals, a prediction Infosecurity Magazine reported when senior analyst Paddy Harrington framed it as a cascade of failures rather than a single point of error. Gartner’s forecast prices the defense. It does not schedule it.
All market sizing data from Gartner, Forecast Analysis: AI-Amplified Security, Worldwide, 2026, published August 4, 2026 (ID G00846160), by Shailendra Upadhyay. AI-amplified security is a subset of the information security forecast and this is not additive spending. Survey data from the 2025 Gartner AI Buying Behavior Survey (n=556, fielded November through December 2025 across North America, Western Europe, and Asia/Pacific, organizations with $50 million or more in enterprisewide revenue) and the 2025 Gartner Cybersecurity Innovations in AI Risk Management and Use Survey (n=302, fielded March 21 through May 9, 2025, organizations with $250 million or more in fiscal 2024 revenue). Gartner notes that neither survey represents global findings or the market as a whole.
CAGR, growth multiples, market share percentages, year-over-year growth rates, incremental spending, net-new dollar allocation, and combined adoption rates computed by Software Strategies Blog from Gartner’s published segment data. Segment values are independently rounded by Gartner and do not always sum to the stated totals. All charts are original visualizations created by Software Strategies Blog.
For each month’s AI agent attacks, exploited CVEs and breaches with primary sources, see my monthly AI security news briefing.
This post is my personal reflection on Gartner’s AI-amplified security research from an industry analyst perspective. It does not represent my employer.
Spending on the chatbots and assistants embedded in enterprise software peaks at $272.6 billion in 2027 and then shrinks every year through 2030. Gartner buried that projection inside the 2Q26 update of its worldwide AI spending forecast, published July 24, and it matters more than the headline total. By 2030, embedded chatbot spending falls back to $205.8 billion, a hair above its 2025 starting point.
Embedded agenticAI takes the money instead, growing from $88.2 billion in 2025 to $1 trillion by 2030, an 11.4x expansion inside a single software category.
None of that slows the topline. Worldwide AI spending reaches $2.67 trillion in 2026, up 49.5% from 2025, on its way to $5.95 trillion by 2030. The figure Gartner published in May was $2.59 trillion for this year. Ninety days later, the client-facing number runs $74.8 billion higher, and the firm added $496.8 billion to its comparable 2025 through 2030 outlook in a single quarter.
Four tables below show where the money lands, which segments stall, and what Gartner changed its mind about between April and July.
Where $5.95 trillion lands
Infrastructure stays the biggest line through 2030 at $2.79 trillion, even as its share of total spending slides from 55% in 2025 to 46.9% at the end of the window. AI-optimized servers alone reach $981.7 billion by 2030, a 3.4x jump from 2025, and AI processing semiconductors add another $656.4 billion. O
One caution before quoting the total anywhere. Gartner’s note flags the forecast as a view across the whole AI value chain, so the chip and the server it ships inside both get counted. Read $5.95 trillion as the size of the AI economy, not as net end-user budgets.
Devices carry more of the infrastructure number than most readers expect. Business and consumer AI devices combine for $904.4 billion in 2030, and $647.4 billion of that is consumer hardware, the AI PCs and phones landing in shopping carts rather than data centers.
Growth flattens fast after next year. Total spending rises 49% in 2026 and 36% in 2027, then steps down to 21%, 18% and 15% through 2030, while infrastructure decelerates from 51% growth this year to 9% at the end of the forecast.
Of the $883.8 billion in net-new AI spending arriving in 2026, infrastructure absorbs $502.5 billion, or 57 cents of every new dollar. The shape of the curve says the buildout peaks now and software inherits the growth.
Farther down the board, AI cybersecurity at $220.9 billion and AI agents and assistants at $219.9 billion finish 2030 within $1 billion of each other. Gartner created the agents category only this quarter.
Agentic AI crosses $1 trillion inside enterprise software
Gartner rebuilt its segmentation this quarter, splitting cross-functional and consumer agents out of AI software and adding consumer agents to the forecast for the first time. The new structure exposes a replacement cycle the old rollup hid. Inside enterprise software, agentic AI overtakes chatbots in 2027, the same year chatbot spending tops out, and from that peak to 2030 the embedded chatbot line surrenders $66.8 billion.
Cross-functional agents, the ones that work across software from multiple vendors, start from a base of zero. Gartner books $347 million for cross-functional agentic AI in 2026 and $78.1 billion in 2030, a number it raised this quarter on the thesis that these agents begin cannibalizing traditional SaaS by decade’s end. The ceiling matters as much as the curve. Against $1.21 trillion in total 2030 AI software spending, $78.1 billion says the incumbents hold the decade, because data access, integration complexity and execution reliability hold the category back from serious SaaS competition until 2030, in Gartner’s read.
The buy-versus-build verdict is just as lopsided. Agent builder platforms, the tooling for constructing your own agents, reach only $12.6 billion by 2030, so embedded agentic AI outspends them nearly 80 to 1. The first production agent most companies run will ship inside software they already own. Gartner describes exactly that race, with vendors across software categories embedding agentic AI to defend their installed bases against cross-functional challengers.
Consumer agents barely register yet in dollar terms. Gartner carries $26.9 million for consumer agentic AI in 2026, then $17.7 billion in 2027 as paid consumer agents arrive at scale, building to $51.8 billion by 2030. Adding consumer agents and assistants lifted Gartner’s 2030 total by $133 billion. For how these agent numbers stack against other analyst estimates, see my roundup of agentic AI forecasts and market estimates, 2026.
AI security expands 8.5x and splits in two
AI cybersecurity grows from $25.9 billion in 2025 to $220.9 billion in 2030, an 8.5x expansion at a 53.5% compound rate. Spending in the category grew 140% in 2025, and Gartner models another 98% jump this year. AI cybersecurity and AI data were also the only two markets left completely untouched between the 1Q26 and 2Q26 forecasts, which makes security the steadiest conviction in the entire model. For the standalone security spending outlook, see my breakdown of Gartner’s 2Q26 information security forecast.
Two markets move at different speeds inside the category. AI-amplified security, meaning AI capability inside security tooling, carries the volume and reaches $204.5 billion by 2030. Securing AI, the discipline of protecting AI systems themselves, runs smaller and faster, from $1.5 billion in 2025 to $16.4 billion in 2030 at a 60.4% compound rate.
Set the security numbers against the agent forecast and an exposure gap opens. The 2030 outlook has enterprises running $1.08 trillion of embedded and cross-functional agentic software while spending $16.4 billion to secure AI systems, roughly $66 of agentic software for every $1 of securing-AI budget. AI observability and governance tooling adds just $3.9 billion more. A software wave that large riding on a security ratio that thin is the budget argument CISOs should be starting now.
The fastest growth goes to whatever cuts the bill
Rank every segment by compound growth and one pattern jumps out, because the fastest-growing lines are the ones that make AI cheaper. Synthetic data generation leads the entire forecast at a 142.5% compound rate, expanding 84x from $146 million in 2025 to $12.2 billion in 2030. AI-ready datasets, the licensed real-data alternative, peak at $583 million in 2029 and then decline, leaving synthetic data outselling licensed data 22 to 1 by 2030. Gartner is forecasting the substitution of purchased data itself.
Domain-specific language models tell the same cost story at larger scale. DSLMs and specialized models grow 210% in 2026 and compound at 84.5% through 2030, rising from 12.2% of all model spend to 24.3%. Cost pressure also explains the strangest revision in the update. Gartner cut $57.8 billion in cumulative dollars from its generative AI model forecast while raising the segment’s 2026 growth rate from 110% to 117%, which nets out to more deployments running on cheaper models and smaller checks. Arunasree Cheparthi, a senior principal research analyst at Gartner and one of the forecast’s authors, said in the firm’s July 20 platforms and models announcement that spending “is shifting toward providers who can demonstrate clear value.”
What Gartner changed in 90 days
Between the April forecast and this one, Gartner added $500.8 billion to AI infrastructure across the 2025 through 2030 window, the largest revision in the update, and did it while flagging memory-related price increases. The note calls infrastructure demand inelastic to that pricing pressure, because hyperscalers keep buying AI-optimized servers on the conviction that model capabilities improve through 2030.
Software took the other side of the trade. AI software gained $191.9 billion and application development platforms picked up $10.7 billion. Gartner lifted the 2026 app-dev growth rate from 28% to 39% as enterprises build custom AI applications and demand usage tracking to prove the spend. The cuts land on everything that resembles consulting or plumbing. AI services lost $80.7 billion across the window, with every single year revised down, and platforms for data science and machine learning lost $68.2 billion, including an 8% cut to 2027 alone.
The services cut hides a structural shift rather than a retreat. Gartner still sizes AI services at $1.25 trillion in 2030, but the growth belongs to indirect services, which compound at 34.5% and pass direct, consulting-led engagements in 2028. Direct AI services compound at 15.7%, less than half the indirect rate. Buyers are routing transformation budgets through software and cloud purchases instead of billable hours.
Three dates to plan against
2027 is the year chatbot spending tops out and agentic AI takes over inside enterprise software, which gives any vendor still selling assistant-branded features through the end of next year to ride what growth remains. By 2028, indirect services pass consulting-led engagements and infrastructure growth drops to 15%, so the buildout stops flattering everyone’s numbers. And 2030 arrives with $1.08 trillion of agentic software guarded by $16.4 billion of securing-AI spend. The first two dates decide where the money goes, and the third decides what happens when it arrives unprotected.
This post is my personal reflection on Gartner’s AI spending research from an industry analyst perspective. It does not represent my employer.
Source: Gartner, Forecast: AI Spending, Worldwide, 2025-2030, 2Q26, Kay Arnott, Jon Erensen, Amarendra, Adrian O’Connell, Arunasree Cheparthi, Naresh Singh, Peter Middleton, Hardeep Singh, Shailendra Upadhyay, Rishi Padhi, 24 July 2026, G00855896.
Gartner's 2Q26 information security forecast puts 2026 spending at $248.2B and adds securing AI for the first time, making other security software the only segment accelerating through 2030.
Two of Gartner’s 10 fastest-growing security categories have zero venture-backed startups. Firewall equipment, a $26.7 billion market by 2030, and pure-play cloud access security brokers, projected at $7.1 billion, are controlled entirely by incumbent vendors. No startup has raised a dollar in either category since January 2025.
I cross-referenced Gartner’s 1Q26 Information Security forecast against CB Insights, Crunchbase, and PitchBook funding data for every one of the 10 fastest-growing security categories. The question: where is venture capital following Gartner’s growth signal, and where is it missing?
The answer is stark. $93.2 billion in projected 2030 spending across these 10 categories. $11.2 billion in total VC raised by 59 funded startups. That is an 8.3:1 gap between where enterprise demand is heading and where startup capital is flowing. In 5 of 10 categories, the gap exceeds 12:1. As I detailed in last week’s analysis of the 10 fastest-growing categories, growth is concentrating in cloud infrastructure, proactive intelligence, and privacy compliance. The VC data tells you whether anyone is building what CISOs need to buy.
“Cybersecurity leaders are navigating uncharted territory this year as these forces converge, testing the limits of their teams in an environment defined by constant change,” said Alex Michaels, Director at Gartner. The spending data confirms it. The startup funding data shows the supply side has not caught up.
The master table: Gartner forecast vs. startup funding by category
I mapped each Gartner category against every cybersecurity startup that raised equity or debt since January 2025. Each company is assigned to one primary category to avoid double-counting. Gap Ratio is the Gartner 2030 market projection divided by total VC raised. Higher means wider gap.
Source: Gartner 1Q26 Information Security Market Current Outlook (G00846158, March 2026). Growth rates in constant currency. Funding data from CB Insights, Crunchbase, PitchBook. Analysis by Software Strategies Blog, April 2026.
The table splits cleanly into three tiers. Five categories are underfunded or locked out (Gap Ratio above 9:1). Two sit in the middle. Three are oversupplied or ahead of the Gartner signal.
Gap #1: CASB — 39:1, and the category is disappearing
Gartner projects cloud access security brokers reaching $7.1 billion by 2030 at a 24.3% CAGR. Total startup funding since January 2025: $182 million across just 4 companies.
Company
Total Funding
Last Round
Lead Investor
HQ
Founded
Reco
$85M
$30M Series B
Zeev Ventures
New York
2020
Seraphic Security
$44M
$29M Series A
GreatPoint Ventures
Palo Alto / Israel
2020
Nudge Security
$35M
$22.5M Series A
Cerberus Ventures
Austin, TX
2021
Spin.AI
$18M+
Undisclosed (K1)
K1 Investment Mgmt
Palo Alto
2017
The gap is structural, not cyclical. Pure-play CASB startups no longer exist as a standalone category. The buying motion has shifted to SASE platforms. Cato Networks raised $409 million in a Series G in June 2025, but that money funds a unified SASE platform spanning CASB, ZTNA, and SD-WAN.
For CISOs, the implication is direct. If your CASB requirement is standalone, your vendor options are Netskope, Skyhigh, Forcepoint, and a handful of sub-$50 million startups. Expect fewer competitive bids and less pricing leverage than in categories where VC is abundant.
Gap #2: CSPM — 21.5:1, the fastest-growing category is still starved
Cloud security posture management is the single fastest-growing category in Gartner’s entire information security forecast. 33.4% growth in 2026. $16.2 billion by 2030 at a 27.6% five-year CAGR. Total startup funding: $752 million across 6 companies.
Company
Total Funding
Last Round
Lead Investor
HQ
Founded
Upwind Security
$430M
$250M Series B
Bessemer Venture Partners
San Francisco
2022
Noma Security
$132M
$100M Series B
Evolution Equity Partners
New York / Tel Aviv
2023
Sentra
$100M+
$50M Series B
Key1 Capital
New York / Tel Aviv
2021
Native Security
$42M
$31M Series A
Ballistic Ventures
Tel Aviv / Seattle
2024
Mondoo
$32.5M
$17.5M Series A Ext
HV Capital
San Francisco
2020
AccuKnox
$15M
$4M Venture
DreamIt Ventures
Menlo Park
2020
Upwind alone accounts for 57% of all CSPM startup capital. It hit unicorn status at a $1.5 billion valuation in January 2026. But one company cannot fill a $16.2 billion market.
Alphabet’s $32 billion acquisition of Wiz in March 2026 removed the largest independent cloud security company from the startup market entirely. In my analysis of $3.6 billion in agentic AI security funding, I tracked how M&A is filling gaps that VC has not. CSPM is a category where that pattern is accelerating.
Gap #3: Vulnerability Assessment — 20.9:1, the most active seed-stage category
Gartner projects vulnerability assessment at $6.4 billion by 2030. Total VC: $306 million across 6 companies.
Company
Total Funding
Last Round
Lead Investor
HQ
Founded
Zafran Security
$130M
$60M Series C
Menlo Ventures
New York
2022
Seemplicity
$82M+
$50M Series B
Sienna Venture Capital
Tel Aviv
2020
Cogent Security
$53M
$42M Series A
Bain Capital Ventures
San Francisco
2024
Nucleus Security
$20M+
$20M Series C
Undisclosed
Tampa, FL
2018
Onit Security
$11M
$11M Seed
Hetz Ventures
Tel Aviv
2025
ZAST.AI
~$10M
$6M Pre-A
Hillhouse Capital
Seattle
2024
This is the category with the most active early-stage investment. Cogent Security and Onit Security both use AI agents for autonomous vulnerability remediation. Zafran tripled ARR since its prior round. The agentic AI thesis is landing hardest in vulnerability management, and the funding trail shows it.
Balbix, which had raised $98.6 million, was acquired in November 2025. For CISOs evaluating this category, the vendor field is young and fragmented. Half of the funded companies were founded in 2024 or later.
Where VC is ahead of Gartner
Three categories show the opposite pattern. In Consent & Preference Management, OneTrust alone has raised $2.1 billion against a $2.0 billion Gartner projection. In Threat Intelligence, $3.16 billion in VC against a $6.9 billion projection, but Dataminr ($1.24B) and ReliaQuest ($1.13B) account for 75% of the total. In ZTNA, Cato Networks’ $1.1 billion alone represents 57% of all category funding.
The concentration risk matters. Strip out the single largest company in each oversupplied category and the gap ratios invert. Consent without OneTrust: $510 million, Gap Ratio 3.9:1. Threat Intelligence without Dataminr and ReliaQuest: $790 million, Gap Ratio 8.7:1. ZTNA without Cato: $835 million, Gap Ratio 7.7:1.
M&A is filling the gaps VC won’t
When startups cannot fill the gap, platform vendors acquire. The $3.6 billion in agentic AI security funding and $96 billion in M&A I tracked in March tells this story at scale. Palo Alto Networks assembled $29 billion in acquisitions. ServiceNow spent $11.6 billion. Alphabet closed $32 billion for Wiz. Veeam acquired Securiti.ai for $1.725 billion, removing the leading subject rights automation vendor from the independent market.
Forrester’s 2026 cybersecurity budget data confirms the same pattern from the buyer side. Security budgets are growing, but the spend is concentrating in fewer, larger platform purchases.
What this means for CISOs
In underfunded categories, build internally or accept platform vendor lock-in. CSPM, vulnerability assessment, and CWPP all have Gap Ratios above 12:1. Fewer funded startups means fewer competitive alternatives. If your preferred vendor gets acquired, as Wiz, Securiti.ai, and Balbix all were, your roadmap depends on the acquirer’s priorities, not yours.
In oversupplied categories, use the competition for better pricing. ZTNA, threat intelligence, and consent management have abundant VC-backed alternatives. Negotiate harder. Run competitive evaluations with three or more vendors. The funding data tells you which categories give you leverage.
Watch for single-company concentration. Chainguard holds 70% of all CWPP startup funding. Cato holds 57% of ZTNA. OneTrust holds 80% of consent management. If any of these companies pivots, gets acquired, or fails, the category funding picture changes overnight.
Bottom line
Gartner projects $93.2 billion in 2030 spending across the 10 fastest-growing security categories. Venture capital has funded $11.2 billion in startups since January 2025. The 8.3:1 blended gap tells you the overall story. The category-level ratios tell you where to act.
Cloud security posture management, vulnerability assessment, and cloud workload protection are growing at 2x to 3x the market average but remain underfunded relative to Gartner’s projections. Two categories, firewall equipment and pure-play CASB, have no startup investment at all. Platform vendors are filling gaps through acquisition at a pace that is reshaping every competitive evaluation.
This is the third quarter I have tracked Gartner’s security forecast against independent funding data. The gap between enterprise demand and startup supply keeps widening. Gartner’s 2Q26 forecast lands in July. I will break down the updated Gap Ratios the week it drops. I wrote a shorter editorial take on what these gaps mean for CISO budgets on my Substack.
Source: Gartner, Information Security Market Current Outlook, Worldwide, 1Q26 (G00846158), March 2026. Growth rates in constant currency. Dollar figures in current U.S. dollars. Funding data from CB Insights, Crunchbase, PitchBook, Statista. Cross-referenced against company press releases. Analysis by Software Strategies Blog.
$30.6 billion in new security spending in a single year. Gartner's 1Q26 Information Security forecast projects $246.2 billion in 2026 spending across 41 categories. Cloud Security Posture Management leads at 33.4% growth, followed by Threat Intelligence at 27.3% and Cloud Access Security Brokers at 27.2%. Two legacy categories are declining. I analyzed the full dataset to rank the 10 fastest-growing categories by growth rate and what they mean for CISO budgets.
Inside the $244.2 billion security market: agentic AI adoption outpaces defenses 8 to 1, cloud security grows at 28.8%, and enterprises spend 17x more on AI tools than on securing the AI itself
The headline looks healthy. Look closer, and it isn’t. I’ve been tracking Gartner’s information security forecast through multiple quarterly updates, and the trajectory keeps steepening. But the spending acceleration is masking a deeper problem: enterprises are deploying AI agents into production far faster than they are securing them.
The 40% / 6% gap
Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026. Up from less than 5% in January. These are not chatbots. Gartner’s examples include autonomous cybersecurity response agents that scan network traffic, analyze system logs, and initiate responses without human intervention.
Only roughly 6% of organizations report having an advanced AI security strategy in place, according to vendor-sourced research from BigID’s 2025 AI Risk and Readiness study. Even adjusting for methodology differences between vendor and analyst research, the gap is stark. Agents are entering production at roughly 7-8x the rate organizations are building governance around them.
Gartner’s 4Q25 AI spending forecast created a dedicated agentic AI market segment for the first time. The spending lines are dramatic. Agentic AI overtakes chatbot and assistant spending by 2027. By 2029, agentic AI will reach $752.7 billion at a 119% compound annual growth rate. Chatbot spending peaks at $264.7 billion, then declines. That crossover point is where the security model breaks, because chatbots operate within human-supervised sessions. Agents don’t.
Forrester’s 2026 cybersecurity predictions go further: an agentic AI deployment will cause a publicly disclosed data breach this year, leading to employee dismissals. Senior analyst Paddy Harrington frames it as a cascade of failures, not a single point of error. That prediction landed in October 2025. Nothing since has made it less likely.
$244.2 billion, and where it goes
Gartner’s 4Q25 information security forecast projects global spending reaching $244.2 billion in 2026, up 13.3% year-over-year. That is acceleration, not continuation. Gartner’s forecast trajectory has been steepening for multiple quarters. It follows a year where many CISOs focused on consolidating tools rather than buying new ones.
The allocation matters more than the total (please click on the graphic to expand for easier reading):
Cloud security at 28.8% growth is the fastest subsegment by a wide margin. CSPM alone carries a 31.3% CAGR. These represent organizations reacting to attack surfaces that expanded when workloads moved to the cloud faster than security controls followed.
Managed security services at 11.1% tells a workforce story the spending headline misses. The ISC2 documented a global cybersecurity workforce gap of 4.8 million professionals in October 2024. That gap grew 19% year-over-year while the active workforce flatlined at 5.5 million. A quarter of organizations reported cybersecurity layoffs. So they’re buying SOC capacity from managed providers instead. The spending growth in managed services is a staffing problem wearing a procurement mask.
The 17:1 spending asymmetry
Gartner’s 4Q25 AI spending forecast splits the AI cybersecurity market into two sub-segments for the first time. AI-amplified security, using AI to defend the enterprise, reached $49 billion in 2025. Securing AI itself, protecting the models, training data, inference pipelines, agent workflows, and decision outputs, stood at $2.8 billion. That is 5.5% of the AI cybersecurity market.
Enterprises are investing 17 times more in AI-powered security tools than in securing the AI on which those tools run. Gartner projects over 75% of enterprises will use AI-amplified cybersecurity products by 2028, up from less than 25% in 2025. The tools are getting funded. What the tools actually depend on to function is not.
That means consulting engagements for quantum migration planning. Cryptographic discovery tools to figure out which systems need replacing first. Post-quantum algorithm testing across live production environments. Gartner calls post-quantum cryptography a force that demands organizations identify, manage, and replace traditional encryption methods now. Not eventually. The encryption market is growing at 2.0x according to the 4Q25 forecast, and the planning horizon is 2030. Starting migration in 2028 means compounding rip-and-replace costs every quarter of delay.
Forrester also predicts the EU will establish its own known exploited vulnerability database in 2026. Regulatory fragmentation adds cost. For enterprises operating across jurisdictions, quantum migration planning cannot be separated from compliance architecture.
57% of employees are already using shadow AI
A smaller Gartner survey of 175 employees conducted between May and November 2025 found that 57% use personal GenAI accounts for work. A third admitted to uploading sensitive information to tools their organizations have not sanctioned.
I keep coming back to this stat because it reframes the entire agentic AI security conversation. The firewalls most enterprises rely on were built for human-to-application communication. Protocols like MCP now enable agent-to-agent interaction at a scale and speed those tools were never designed to see. Machine identities outnumber human employees by more than 80 to 1 in most enterprises, according to CyberArk. Traditional IAM was not built for nonhuman actors operating autonomously.
Gartner’s cybersecurity trends report identifies IAM adaptation for AI agents as a top-six trend for 2026, specifically calling out identity registration, credential automation, and policy-driven authorization for machine actors. Failure to address these issues will lead to greater access-related cybersecurity incidents as autonomous agents become more prevalent.
The investment context: AI in the trough, security in the gap
Gartner places AI in the Trough of Disillusionment throughout 2026. AI will most often be sold by incumbent software providers rather than bought as part of new moonshot projects. ROI predictability has to improve before enterprises scale their deployments.
Forrester’s 2026 predictions reinforce this: enterprises will defer 25% of planned AI spending into 2027 as financial rigor slows production deployments and kills proofs of concept. Fewer than one-third of decision-makers can tie AI value to their organization’s financial growth.
Infrastructure spending runs hot. Application-layer AI spending cools. Security spending accelerates into the gap between adoption speed and governance readiness. The $244.2 billion flowing into information security is the cost of operating in an environment where AI agents are proliferating faster than the controls designed to govern them.
What these numbers add up to
For two decades, enterprise security assumed a human on the other end of every session, every credential request, every decision. That assumption is collapsing. The autonomous agent accessing your production database at 3 AM doesn’t authenticate the way your SOC analyst does, doesn’t respect the same governance boundaries, and operates at speeds no human reviewer can match.
What makes this moment different from previous security inflection points is the speed asymmetry. When cloud migration created new attack surfaces, enterprises had years to adapt. The shift from on-prem to cloud took a decade. The shift from human-operated to agent-operated environments is measured in quarters. Gartner didn’t even have a dedicated agentic AI spending segment until this forecast cycle. By the next one, the crossover will have already happened.
The practical question for 2026 is not whether to invest in AI security. That decision has been made by the spending trajectory. It is whether to govern AI agents proactively, before the first publicly disclosed agentic breach forces a reactive scramble, or to wait and pay the premium that every late mover in cybersecurity history has paid. Forrester has already predicted which outcome is more likely this year. The 17:1 ratio suggests most enterprises are betting on the wrong side of that question.
Sources
Gartner Forecast: Information Security, Worldwide, 2023–2029, 4Q25 (December 18, 2025)
Gartner Forecast Analysis: Information Security, Worldwide, 2026 (February 5, 2026)
Gartner Forecast: AI Spending, Worldwide, 2024–2029, 4Q25 (December 2025)
Over 57% of employees are using personal GenAI accounts for work. A third of them admit to uploading sensitive data into tools their security teams haven’t approved. Meanwhile, agentic AI is proliferating through no-code platforms and vibe coding, creating attack surfaces most CISOs can’t see, let alone govern. And quantum computing? No longer a 10-year planning horizon. It’s a 2030 action deadline.
Gartner’s Top Trends in Cybersecurity for 2026 report, released February 5, 2026, identifies six forces reshaping how CISOs must operate. These cut across governance, AI adoption, identity, workforce, and cryptographic strategy simultaneously. None of them is incremental.
The trends report lands alongside Gartner’s updated Forecast: Information Security, Worldwide, 2023–2029, 4Q25 (G00843183, December 18, 2025) and the Forecast Analysis: Information Security, Worldwide, 2026 (G00838442, February 5, 2026), which together project global information security spending reaching $244.2 billion in 2026, up 13.3% in current U.S. dollars. I’ve tracked this forecast through multiple quarterly updates. The trajectory keeps steepening. The six trends below explain where that money is going and why.
“Cybersecurity leaders are navigating uncharted territory this year as these forces converge, testing the limits of their teams in an environment defined by constant change,” said Alex Michaels, Director Analyst at Gartner. “This demands new approaches to cyber risk management, resilience, and resource allocation.”
The spending backdrop: $244 billion and accelerating
Before getting into the six trends, context matters. Gartner’s 4Q25 forecast shows the three major security segments all growing at double-digit constant currency rates in 2026:
Cloud security remains the fastest-growing subsegment at 28.8% growth in 2026. Nothing else comes close. The combined cloud security market (cloud security posture management, cloud access security brokers, and cloud workload protection platforms) is projected to reach $32.4 billion by 2029, with a 25% CAGR in constant currency. I’ve been watching this subsegment accelerate for three quarters straight. CSPM alone is growing at a 31.30% CAGR.
Cloud security spending reaches $32.4 billion by 2029. CSPM leads at 31.30% CAGR. Source: Gartner 4Q25 Forecast. (Please click on the image to expand for easier reading)
Trend 1: Agentic AI demands cybersecurity oversight
This is the trend that touches everything else on this list. Employees and developers are deploying AI agents through no-code/low-code platforms and “vibe coding” at a pace that outstrips security governance. Unmanaged AI agent proliferation. Unsecured code. Compliance violations that most security teams don’t even have visibility into yet. That’s the picture Gartner is painting.
Gartner’s recommendation is blunt: cybersecurity leaders must identify both sanctioned and unsanctioned AI agents operating within their environments, enforce access controls and data guardrails, and develop incident response playbooks specific to agent-driven threats.
“While AI agents and automation tools are becoming increasingly accessible and practical for organizations to adopt, strategic cybersecurity planning for these technologies is essential,” said Michaels. Cybersecurity leaders must work cross-functionally to manage agentic AI adoption, identifying sanctioned and unsanctioned AI agents, enforcing data access controls, and developing incident response playbooks.
Trend 2: Global regulatory volatility drives cyber resilience efforts
Regulators are getting personal. Boards and executives now face direct liability for compliance failures. Not just organizational fines, but individual accountability. The penalties for inaction have moved from theoretical to career-ending. Across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.
Gartner advises cybersecurity leaders to formalize collaboration across legal, business, and procurement teams to establish clear accountability for cyber risk. Align control frameworks to recognized standards. Address data sovereignty concerns before they become enforcement actions. The organizations doing this well are treating regulatory preparedness as a core security function, not an annual compliance checkbox.
This is where the spending data gets interesting. Gartner’s forecast shows security consulting services growing from $24.2 billion (2024) to $36.6 billion (2029), adding $12.4 billion in five years. Security professional services follow a similar trajectory: $27.3 billion to $40.8 billion, adding $13.5 billion. Organizations are buying outside expertise because they can’t build regulatory competence fast enough in-house. I’ve been covering these numbers for three quarters, and the services growth is the part of the forecast that keeps surprising me.
Infrastructure protection adds $26.4 billion between 2024 and 2029, the largest absolute growth of any subsegment. Source: Gartner 4Q25 Forecast. (Please click on the image to expand for easier reading)
Trend 3: Post-quantum computing moves into action plans
Gartner predicts advances in quantum computing will render the asymmetric cryptography that organizations rely on unsafe by 2030. Four years. That’s the window to adopt post-quantum cryptography alternatives before “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks start cashing in on data that adversaries are collecting today.
Organizations need to identify their cryptographic deployments, assess data sensitivity and lifespan, and prioritize cryptographic agility. That last phrase keeps coming up in my conversations with CISOs. The ability to swap encryption methods without re-architecting entire systems. Swapping an algorithm is one thing. Doing it across a production environment without downtime is an entirely different problem.
“Post-quantum cryptography is reshaping cybersecurity strategies by prompting organizations to identify, manage, and replace traditional encryption methods, while prioritizing cryptographic agility,” said Michaels. “By investing in these capabilities and prioritizing migration now, assets will be secured when quantum threats become a reality.“
The encryption market in Gartner’s 4Q25 forecast grows from $1.04 billion in 2023 to $2.04 billion by 2029 at an 11.95% CAGR. A 2.0x increase. For what has historically been one of the slower-growing security subsegments, that’s a significant acceleration. Quantum urgency is changing the math.
Trend 4: Identity and access management adapts to AI agents
AI agents are breaking traditional IAM models. Plain and simple. Identity registration and governance, credential automation, and policy-driven authorization weren’t designed for autonomous machine actors that can initiate actions, access data, and interact with systems without human intervention. The scale problem compounds fast: when every employee can deploy dozens of AI agents, the identity surface area explodes.
Gartner recommends a targeted, risk-based approach. Invest where gaps and risks are greatest. Leverage automation where possible. The practical starting point is understanding which AI agents carry the most privilege and the least oversight. Those are your highest-risk identities right now, and most organizations haven’t inventoried them.
The identity market is already significant. Gartner’s 4Q25 forecast shows identity access management growing from $18.7 billion (2024) to $29.0 billion (2029), adding $10.3 billion in five years. That’s before the full scale of agentic AI identity requirements hits the market. IAM vendors that solve machine-actor identity at scale will capture a disproportionate share of that $10.3 billion growth.
AI-enabled security operations centers are enhancing alert triage and investigation workflows. The technology works. But deploying AI into a SOC doesn’t automatically reduce headcount needs. It changes the skill mix. Analysts who excelled at manual triage need different capabilities to oversee AI-driven workflows. Organizations are discovering this the hard way. That’s an organizational transformation challenge, and throwing more technology at it doesn’t help.
“To realize the full potential of AI in security operations, cybersecurity leaders must prioritize people as much as technology,” said Michaels. “Strengthening workforce capabilities, implementing human-in-the-loop frameworks into AI-supported processes and aligning adoption with clear strategic objectives will be critical to maintaining resilience as SOCs evolve.”
The talent dimension makes this harder than it already sounds. ISC2’s 2024 Cybersecurity Workforce Study, published in October 2024, documented a global workforce gap of 4.8 million professionals, a 19% year-over-year increase. The active workforce flatlined at 5.5 million (up just 0.1%). The numbers are brutal: 25% of organizations reported cybersecurity layoffs in 2024. 37% faced budget cuts. 90% report skills shortages. 58% believe the shortage puts their organization at significant risk. On the spending side, managed security services are growing at 11.1% in 2026, the fastest rate in the services segment. Organizations can’t hire fast enough, so they’re buying managed SOC capacity instead.
Trend 6: GenAI breaks traditional cybersecurity awareness tactics
Existing security awareness programs are failing. Full stop. A Gartner survey of 175 employees conducted between May and November 2025 found that 57% use personal GenAI accounts for work purposes, while 33% admit to uploading sensitive information to tools their organizations haven’t sanctioned. Those numbers should alarm every CISO reading this. A third of your workforce is actively feeding proprietary data into tools you can’t audit.
Gartner recommends shifting from general awareness training to adaptive behavioral programs that include AI-specific tasks. Generic compliance videos won’t cut it here. The organizations getting this right are making approved GenAI tools easy to access and unsanctioned tools hard to justify. Trying to ban GenAI outright just drives usage underground and costs you talent.
Strengthening governance, embedding secure practices, and establishing clear policies for authorized GenAI use will reduce exposure to privacy breaches and intellectual property loss. The governance gap on GenAI usage is, in my view, the most underestimated risk on this entire list. Every other trend has a spending line item attached to it. This one requires behavioral change, which is harder to buy.
Total market trajectory: $173.5 billion to $323.5 billion
Gartner’s year-by-year spending trajectory shows the acceleration curve these six trends are riding:
Source: Gartner Forecast: Information Security, Worldwide, 2023–2029, 4Q25 Update (G00843183, December 18, 2025). Current U.S. dollars.
CSPM and CASB lead all security categories with 31% and 26% CAGR through 2029. Source: Gartner 4Q25 Forecast. (Please click on the image to expand for easier reading)
What this means for CISOs
Three of the six trends (agentic AI oversight, IAM for machine actors, and GenAI awareness) are fundamentally about the same problem: autonomous AI systems operating inside enterprise environments without adequate governance. The other three (regulatory volatility, post-quantum readiness, and AI-driven SOCs) are the structural forces those governance failures will collide with. That convergence is the signal about where 2026 budgets need to go.
The organizations that will navigate this environment successfully are doing three things simultaneously:
Mapping their AI agent footprint now. If you don’t know how many AI agents are operating across your environment, sanctioned and unsanctioned, you can’t govern what you can’t see. Gartner’s 75% AI-amplified product adoption projection by 2028 means this window for establishing control is narrow.
Building cryptographic agility into their architecture. The 2030 quantum deadline means migration planning starts in 2026, not 2028. The encryption market’s 2.0x growth reflects early movers. Late movers face rip-and-replace costs that compound every quarter they wait.
Investing in people alongside AI tooling. AI-enabled SOCs work when human operators have the skills to oversee them. The ISC2 data is unambiguous: a 4.8 million professional gap growing at 19% year-over-year. Managed security services growth at 11.1% tells you where CISOs are finding capacity.
Gartner’s numbers aren’t projections anymore. They’re procurement trends already hitting finance systems. The $244.2 billion flowing into information security this year will fund agentic AI governance, quantum migration, and SOC transformation, whether your organization participates or not.
Bottom line: CISOs planning for 2027 are watching their competitors buy the tools they’ll be scrambling for in 18 months. The data says move now.
Fifteen cybersecurity categories are growing up to three times faster than the overall market, capturing $48.7 billion in new spending by 2029.
That’s nearly half of the $98.4 billion the entire security market will add over the next four years. Cloud Security Posture Management leads the pack at 29.36% CAGR. Cloud Access Security Brokers follow at 24.81%.
Enterprises are fundamentally restructuring their security budgets, and the driver is brutal in its simplicity. Organizations now manage an average of 112 SaaS applications across multiple cloud providers. 82% of misconfigurations are caused by human error, according to Exabeam’s analysis. And Gartner estimates 99% of cloud security failures through 2025 will be the customer’s fault, primarily from these misconfigurations. Manual oversight breaks under this kind of scale. Enterprises are responding by investing in automation that manages what people can’t across hundreds of cloud accounts, thousands of APIs, and millions of attack vectors.
Gartner’s 4Q25 update delivers the clearest signal yet about where enterprise security budgets are heading. The overall information security market grows from $213.5 billion in 2025 to $311.9 billion by 2029 at 10.03% CAGR. These fifteen high-growth categories are expanding at 10.30% to 29.36% CAGR, capturing investment dollars at rates that dwarf legacy security spending patterns.
What makes these categories different
Every high-growth category eliminates manual bottlenecks that break under cloud-native workloads. CSPM scans configurations continuously. CASB provides visibility into unauthorized SaaS usage. ZTNA verifies every connection rather than trusting the network location. With 79% of organizations using multiple cloud providers, according to Spacelift’s research, manual processes create mathematical impossibilities.
These technologies prevent problems rather than clean up after them. CSPM catches misconfigurations before breaches. ZTNA eliminates the attack surface that VPNs create. Tokenization protects data even when systems get compromised. Security teams are finally getting ahead of threats instead of constantly playing catch-up.
And the ROI is quantifiable. IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report shows organizations using AI and automation extensively save $1.9 million per breach and reduce breach lifecycles by 80 days. U.S. breach costs average $10.22 million. These investments pay for themselves with a single prevented incident—a calculation CFOs understand.
CSPM platforms scan infrastructure continuously across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, automatically remediating misconfigurations before they become breaches. The 82% human error rate isn’t going to improve through training. Organizations managing 100+ cloud accounts need automation. CSPM adds $8.09 billion in new spending by 2029, the single largest dollar contribution among high-growth segments.
Modern threat intelligence platforms fuse telemetry from open-source intelligence, dark-web monitoring, vendor feeds, and internal logs. Machine learning prioritizes indicators based on organizational relevance. IBM data shows organizations integrating threat intelligence reduce detection and escalation costs while cutting incidents by 30%. The market reaches $5.69 billion by 2029 as enterprises shift from passive threat feeds to automated response integration.
Traditional endpoint security can’t protect containers that spin up and vanish in seconds. Serverless functions executing for milliseconds? Legacy tools weren’t designed for that. CWPP solutions instrument workloads directly at the kernel or hypervisor level, monitoring system calls, file access, and network connections in real-time. The 21.53% CAGR reflects the rapid shift toward microservices and Kubernetes. As workloads migrate into container clusters, protecting them becomes a survival-level priority.
When users demand “delete my data,” these platforms automate orchestration across internal systems and third-party vendors. Privacy laws grant individuals rights to access, correct, and delete personal data with strict compliance timelines. SRR automation prevents the penalties that result from manual processing failures at scale, especially as more jurisdictions implement data privacy regulations.
NDR platforms establish behavioral baselines using statistical analysis and machine learning. When anomalies appear (unusual lateral movement, data exfiltration attempts, command-and-control traffic), they raise alerts or automatically isolate systems. The mindset shift matters here. Rather than hoping to prevent all attacks, sophisticated organizations invest in rapid detection that minimizes damage when attackers inevitably breach perimeters. Prevention alone isn’t sufficient anymore.
Quarterly vulnerability scans are obsolete in CI/CD pipelines deploying multiple times daily. Modern assessment platforms provide continuous scanning integrated with exploit intelligence to prioritize patches based on real-world risk. DevOps teams need vulnerability detection that keeps pace with their deployment cadence. Anything less creates unacceptable exposure windows.
10. Tokenization — 12.68% CAGR — $1.34B → $2.11B
Tokenization replaces sensitive data with non-reversible tokens that can’t be mathematically decoded. The urgency comes from quantum computing advances. NIST finalized post-quantum encryption standards in August 2024, including ML-KEM (formerly CRYSTALS-Kyber) and ML-DSA (formerly CRYSTALS-Dilithium). Attackers already practice “harvest now, decrypt later”—collecting encrypted data today for quantum decryption within five to ten years. Organizations must begin quantum-safe transitions now.
The largest single category adds $10.68 billion in new spending as ransomware attacks surge. U.S. ransomware attacks increased 149% year-over-year—from 152 incidents in early 2024 to 378 in the same period of 2025, according to Cyble analysis. Next-generation EPP platforms use behavioral analytics and signatureless detection to stop ransomware before encryption begins, catching what traditional antivirus misses.
Malicious sites appear and disappear in hours. Cloud-delivered SWGs update threat intelligence in real-time, protecting remote and hybrid workforces wherever they connect. Integration with ZTNA creates comprehensive security that follows users across devices and locations without relying on network perimeters that no longer exist.
Organizations expose hundreds of APIs and microservices—each a potential attack vector. Traditional network firewalls can’t inspect application-layer attacks like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, or API abuse. Modern WAFs use machine learning to differentiate legitimate user behavior from attack traffic without blocking customers. Getting that balance right is harder than it sounds.
14. Encryption — 10.64% CAGR — $1.35B → $1.98B
NIST’s standardization of quantum-resistant algorithms signals the urgency that organizations can no longer ignore. With quantum computing advances accelerating, encrypted data collected today faces decryption within a decade. Enterprises must transition to post-quantum cryptography now because full integration across complex environments takes years. This isn’t theoretical risk anymore.
15. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) — 10.30% CAGR — $7.60B → $11.15B
Cloud complexity has proven exponential. With 79% of organizations using multiple cloud providers and managing hundreds of accounts, manual security processes break under the load. The 29.36% CAGR for CSPM isn’t market optimism. It’s organizational survival.
Shadow AI joins shadow IT as a core threatscape element. Shadow AI breaches cost $4.63 million—$670,000 more than standard incidents, according to IBM data. But AI also powers the best defenses, with automated security tools reducing breach lifecycles by 80 days. The same technology that creates vulnerabilities offers the most effective countermeasures.
Compliance costs keep accelerating. Between GDPR, CCPA, and emerging global regulations, manual compliance processes create escalating liability. Automated platforms turn regulatory requirements into competitive advantages by reducing fine exposure and accelerating data subject request responses.
Bottom Line
The organizations winning this transformation aren’t those with the largest security budgets. They’re the ones investing in the right categories at the right time. These fifteen segments define what modern security architecture looks like and capture nearly half of all new security spending through 2029.
Gartner’s 4Q25 data delivers a clear message. Security spending is shifting to automation-driven, zero-trust, cloud-native architectures. Organizations still relying on legacy approaches aren’t just falling behind. They’re accepting risks the market has already priced as unacceptable.
Source:Gartner Forecast: Information Security, Worldwide, 2023-2029, 4Q25 Update (Document G00843183, published December 18, 2025), showing overall market growth from $213.5B (2025) to $311.9B (2029) at 10.03% CAGR in constant currency.
