Worldwide spending on information security products and services will increase 7% year-on-year to $86.4-billion this year, driven by the business impact of security incidents and an evolving regulatory landscape.

This spending is expected to grow further to $93-billion in 2018, the latest forecast from Gartner shows.

“As seen in the recent spate of global security incidents, doing the basics right has never been more important,” Gartner principal research analyst Sid Deshpande said in a statement on Wednesday.

He explained that organisations could improve their “security posture” significantly by dealing with just the basic security and risk-related elements, such as threat-centric vulnerability management, centralised log management, internal network segmentation, backups and system hardening.

While security services will continue to be the fastest-growing segment, particularly information technology (IT) outsourcing, consulting and implementation services, the adoption of virtual appliances, public cloud and software as well as service editions of security solutions, which reduces the need for attached hardware support overall, will result in a slowdown in hardware support services growth.

“Within the infrastructure protection segment, Gartner forecasts fast growth in the security testing market, owing to continued data breaches and growing demands for application security testing,” the company noted.

Other key trends highlighted by Gartner included the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will drive 65% of data loss prevention buying decisions today through 2018.

“The GDPR has caused an overall panic and unease among organisations in Europe, but will also have a global effect since multinationals will also need to adhere to the new law,” Gartner said.

Further, by 2020, 40% of all managed security services contracts will be bundled with other security services and broader IT outsourcing projects, up from the current 20%.