Posts from the ‘Shadow IT’ Category

Nov 26

15 fastest-growing security categories in Gartner’s 3Q25 Information Security Forecast

Cloud Security Posture Management is growing at a 31.23% CAGR. Zero Trust Network Access at 23.25%. Threat Intelligence at 22.17%. The overall security market? Just 10.55%. Fifteen categories are outpacing the market by two to three times, collectively capturing $106 billion in new spending by 2029. Enterprise security budgets aren’t just expanding. They’re being redirected.

And the driver? Brutally simple.

Gartner estimates 99% of cloud security failures through 2025 will be the customer’s fault, primarily due to misconfigurations. Organizations are responding by investing aggressively in technologies that automate what humans simply can’t manage manually across hundreds of cloud accounts, thousands of APIs, and millions of potential attack vectors.

What these growth rates say about Gartner’s view of the market

These fifteen categories represent $106.4 billion in new spending by 2029, growing from today’s baseline. What do they have in common? Three characteristics that explain why enterprises are pouring money into them:

Automation at Scale. Every high-growth category automates processes that break when done manually, whether it’s scanning cloud configurations, managing consent across jurisdictions, or detecting behavioral anomalies in network traffic. There’s no other way to keep pace.
Proactive vs. Reactive. 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 if systems are compromised. Security teams are finally getting ahead of the threat curve instead of playing catch-up.
Measurable ROI. 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 lifecycle by 80 days. With U.S. breach costs hitting $10.22 million, these investments pay for themselves with a single prevented incident.

The 15 categories reshaping security architecture

1. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) | 31.23% CAGR | $2.5B → $13.0B

CSPM tools continuously scan infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. With 82% of misconfigurations caused by human error and organizations managing 100+ cloud accounts, CSPM automates what’s mathematically impossible to do manually. The market will reach $15.6 billion by 2032.

2. Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) | 25.82% CAGR | $1.5B → $5.8B

Here’s a reality check. Enterprises average 112 SaaS applications, but shadow IT, or unauthorized apps, accounts for 42% of all applications. IT remains unaware of one-third of the apps on its networks. The damage? 65% of shadow IT companies suffer data loss, and 52% experience breaches. CASBs transform this chaos into visibility and control.

3. Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) | 23.25% CAGR | $1.6B → $5.6B

ZTNA kills the VPN model. Instead of network access, it provides application-specific connections verified for every request. Gartner predicts 70% of new remote access deployments will use ZTNA by 2025. With 65% of companies planning to replace VPNs, this shift represents a wholesale rethinking of secure access. The perimeter-based model is dying. Good riddance.

4. Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) | 22.78% CAGR | $3.9B → $13.5B

CWPP platforms secure everything from traditional VMs to containers that exist for milliseconds. Legacy endpoint security can’t protect ephemeral containers or serverless functions—it wasn’t designed for workloads that appear and disappear in seconds. The shift to microservices demands purpose-built security.

5. Consent and Preference Management | 22.39% CAGR | $0.5B → $1.7B

GDPR fines reached €5.88 billion by January 2025, according to the DLA Piper GDPR Fines and Data Breach Survey. California’s CCPA penalties continue climbing; the California Privacy Protection Agency fined Todd Snyder $345,178 for inadequate opt-out and privacy request processes. Manual handling can’t meet regulatory deadlines. Automation prevents massive fines.

6. Threat Intelligence | 22.17% CAGR | $1.8B → $5.8B

IBM data shows threat intelligence reduces detection and escalation costs by $1.63 million while cutting incidents by 30%. Modern platforms aggregate data about bad actors and vulnerabilities, transforming raw threat data into automated responses across security stacks. The days of threat feeds sitting in dashboards, unused, are over.

7. Subject Rights Request Automation | 16.53% CAGR | $0.8B → $2.1B

When users demand “delete my data,” these platforms automate the process across all systems. Manual handling doesn’t scale, not when you’re managing requests across multiple jurisdictions with different requirements and tight deadlines.

8. Tokenization | 14.26% CAGR | $1.0B → $2.2B

Tokenization replaces sensitive data with meaningless tokens that can’t be mathematically reversed. Why the urgency now? NIST standardized quantum-resistant algorithms, including ML-KEM (formerly CRYSTALS-Kyber), in August 2024. Organizations are preparing for quantum threats expected within five to ten years.

9. Network Detection and Response (NDR) | 14.05% CAGR | $1.6B → $3.5B

NDR platforms use AI to establish behavioral baselines and detect anomalies signaling compromise. Here’s the mindset shift: rather than hoping to prevent all attacks, innovative organizations invest in rapid detection that minimizes damage when sophisticated attackers inevitably get through. Prevention isn’t enough anymore.

10. Vulnerability Assessment | 13.98% CAGR | $2.6B → $5.7B

Cloud infrastructure changes constantly. Quarterly scans are obsolete before they finish. Modern platforms provide continuous scanning in CI/CD pipelines, prioritizing based on real-world exploit data. DevOps teams deploying daily need vulnerability detection that keeps pace. Anything less is theater.

11. Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) | 13.61% CAGR | $13.5B → $29.1B

The largest category doubles to $29.1 billion as ransomware attacks surge. According to Cyble analysis cited by TechTarget, U.S. ransomware attacks increased by 149% year-over-year in the first five weeks of 2025. Manufacturing led targets with 638 attacks in 2023, per Statista data compiled by Fortinet. Next-gen EPP uses behavioral analytics to stop ransomware before encryption begins—catching what traditional antivirus misses.

12. Secure Web Gateway (SWG) | 13.26% CAGR | $3.3B → $7.0B

Malicious sites appear and disappear in hours. Cloud-delivered SWGs update threat intelligence in real-time, protecting remote workers wherever they connect. Integration with ZTNA creates comprehensive security that follows users across devices and locations. The old perimeter? It no longer exists.

13. Web Application Firewalls (WAF) | 11.93% CAGR | $2.0B → $3.8B

Organizations expose hundreds of APIs, each a potential attack vector. Traditional network firewalls can’t inspect application-layer attacks. Modern WAFs use machine learning to distinguish legitimate users from attackers without blocking customers. Getting that balance right is harder than it sounds.

14. Encryption | 11.90% CAGR | $1.0B → $2.0B

NIST’s standardization of quantum-resistant algorithms signals urgency. Attackers already practice “harvest now, decrypt later”—collecting encrypted data for future quantum decryption. Organizations must transition to post-quantum cryptography now, as full integration takes years. This isn’t theoretical risk anymore.

15. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) | 11.74% CAGR | $5.8B → $11.3B

AI transforms SIEM from reactive to proactive. Organizations using AI-powered automation save $1.9 million per breach, according to IBM’s newsroom. Machine learning models identify attack patterns and detect zero-day threats before signatures exist, turning security operations into a competitive advantage.

The Investment Thesis behind the numbers

These growth rates reflect three converging realities:

Cloud Complexity Is Exponential. With 79% of organizations using multiple cloud providers and managing hundreds of accounts, manual security is mathematically impossible. The 31.23% CAGR for CSPM isn’t optimism, it’s survival.
AI Changes Everything. Shadow AI breaches cost $4.63 million, $670,000 more than standard incidents. But AI also powers the defense, with automated security tools reducing breach lifecycles by 80 days. The same technology that creates vulnerabilities offers the best defense.
Compliance Costs Are Skyrocketing. Between GDPR, CCPA, and emerging regulations, manual compliance is a liability that grows daily. Automation platforms turn regulatory requirements into competitive advantages.

The Bottom Line

The organizations winning this race aren’t those with the most significant security budgets; they’re those investing in the right categories at the right time. These fifteen segments aren’t just growing fast; they’re defining what modern security architecture looks like.

The message from Gartner’s data is unambiguous: security spending is shifting from reactive to proactive, from manual to automated, from perimeter-based to zero-trust. Organizations still relying on legacy approaches aren’t just falling behind; they’re accepting risks that the market has already priced as unacceptable.

Source: Gartner Information Security Forecast 3Q25 Update (Document G00839334), showing overall market growth from $215.8B (2025) to $322.2B (2029) at 10.55% CAGR

Dec 21

Shadow IT Is The Cybersecurity Threat That Keeps Giving All Year Long

More than 5,000 personal devices connect to enterprise networks every day with little or no endpoint security enabled in one of every three companies in the U.S., U.K., and Germany.
More than 1,000 shadow IoT devices connect to enterprise networks every day in 30% of the U.S., U.K., and German companies.
12% of U.K. organizations are seeing more than 10,000 shadow IoT devices connect to their enterprise networks every day.
Associates most often use shadow IT devices to access social media (39%), followed by downloading apps (24%), games (13%), and films (7%). Hackers, organized crime and state-sponsored cybercrime organizations rely on social engineering hacks, phishing, and malware injection across these four popular areas to gain access to enterprise networks and exfiltrate data.

Shadow personal IoT voice assistants, Amazon Kindles, smartphone, and tablet devices are proliferating across enterprise networks today, accelerated by last-minute shopping everyone is trying to get done before the end of December. 82% of organizations have introduced security policies governing the use of these devices but just 24% of employees are aware of them. Meanwhile, the majority of IT senior management, 88%, believe their policies are effective. These and many other fascinating insights are from a recent study completed by Infoblox titled, What is Lurking on Your Network, Exposing the threat of shadow devices (PDF, 7 pp., no opt-in).

Shadow IT’s Security Gaps Create New Opportunities For Hackers

Gaps in threat surface and endpoint security are what hackers, organized crime, and state-sponsored cybercrime organizations thrive on. The holidays create new opportunities for these organizations to capitalize on security gaps using social engineering hacks, phishing, malware injection and more. “With cybercriminals increasingly exploiting vulnerable devices, as well as targeting employees’ insecure usage of these devices, it is crucial for enterprise IT teams to discover what’s lurking on their networks and actively defend against the threats introduced,” Gary Cox, Technology Director, Western Europe for Infoblox said. Just a few of the many threats include the following:

A quick on-ramp for hackers to exfiltrate data from enterprise systems. Every personal device left unprotected on an enterprise network is an ideal threat surface for hackers and other malicious actors to infiltrate an enterprise network from. The most common technique is to use DNS tunneling, which enables cybercriminals to insert malware or pass stolen information into DNS queries, creating a covert communication channel that bypasses most firewalls. Project Sauron was one particularly advanced threat, which allegedly went undetected for five years at a number of organizations that used DNS tunneling for data exfiltration.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are often launched from a series of hijacked connected devices that are often the least protected threat surface on corporate networks. It’s common for DDoS attacks to begin with malicious actors hijacking any vulnerable device they can to launch repeated and frequent queries that bombard the Domain Name Server (DNS) with the intent of slowing down its ability to process legitimate queries, often to the point that it can no longer function.
Creating and targeting Botnet armies using vulnerable IoT devices to attack organizations’ enterprise systems is increasing, according to Verizon’s latest 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report. “Botnets are truly a low-effort attack that knows no boundaries and brings attackers either direct revenue through financial account,” according to Verizon’s 2019 study. Botnets are also being used to steal privileged access credentials to an enterprises’ systems that are being accessed from the same personal devices employees are using for social media access and shopping. There have been over 40,000 breaches initiated using botnets this year so far, according to Verizon. The report notes that a variant of the Mirai IoT botnet began scanning for vulnerable Drupal servers in April of this year and was successful in finding the most vulnerable systems globally to install crypto mining software. The attack is known as Drupalgeddon2, and the scope of its vulnerabilities are still being discovered today.
Unsecured personal devices connected to enterprise networks are ransomware landing zones. 70% of all malware attacks happen in healthcare according to Verizon’s 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report because patient health records are bestsellers on the Dark Web, ranging in price from $250 to over $1,000 per record. Ransomware is a form of malware that, once it takes over a computer or network, threatens to deny access to or destroy an organizations’ data. Ransomware can easily intercept an enterprise network after being accidentally downloaded by an employee on either a business or personal device connected to a network.

Where To Start: Secure The Networks Shadow IT Relies On

Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) have told me that the most challenging aspect of securing the proliferation of shadow IT devices is protecting the multitude of remote locations that together form their distributed networks. They’re saying that in 2020, enabling network security is the greatest challenge their enterprises will face. More enterprises are adopting cloud-based DDI platforms that enable enterprises to simplify the management of highly distributed remote networks as well as to optimize the network performance of cloud-based applications. Leaders in this area include Infoblox, a leader in SD-WAN and cloud-based DDI platforms for enterprises. Here are the most common strategies they’re relying on to secure their distributed networks based on the proliferation of personal devices:

Integrating threat intelligence data to evaluate if specific sites and applications are high risk or not. IT administrators need to deploy solutions that allow them to build safeguards that will prevent potential dangerous activity occurring on the network. Integrating threat intelligence data into DNS management enables security teams to monitor and prevent access to Newly Observed Domains. Many new domains will be set up ahead of phishing and/or spear-phishing campaign, so in preventing access to these sites, organizations can reduce the risk of employees accidentally introducing malware through clicking through to insecure links on personal devices connected to the enterprise network.
Set the goal of achieving full visibility across distributed networks by starting with a plan that considers cloud-based DDI platforms. CISOs and the IT teams working with them need to translate their policies into action by achieving more unified visibility by upgrading their core network services, including DNS, DHCP, and IP address management, on cloud-based DDI platforms to bring greater security scale and reliability across their enterprise networks.
Design in greater DNS security at the network level. Enterprise networks are heavily reliant on DNS, making them an area malicious actors attempt to disrupt in their broader efforts to exfiltrate valuable data from organizations. Existing security controls, such as firewalls and proxies, rarely focus on DNS and associated threats – leaving organizations vulnerable to highly aggressive, rapidly proliferating attacks. When secured, the DNS can act as an organization’s first line of defense. The DNS can provide essential context and visibility, so IT teams can be alerted of any network anomalies, report on what devices are joining and leaving the network, and resolve problems faster.

Conclusion

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives’ benefits far outweigh the costs, making the business case for BYOD overwhelming positive, as seen in how financial services firms stay secure. Enterprises need to consider adopting a cloud-based DDI platform approach that enables them to simplify the management of highly distributed remote networks as well as to optimize the network performance of cloud-based applications. Many CISOs are beginning to realize the model of relying on centralized IT security isn’t scaling to support and protect the proliferation of user devices with internet access, leaving employees, branch offices, and corporate networks less secure than ever before. Every IT architect, IT Director, or CIO needs to consider how taking an SDWAN-based approach to network management reduces the risk of a breach and data exfiltration.