Mumbai, Aug 9 (IANS): The global spending on information security products and services will reach $81.6 billion in 2016 -- an increase of 7.9 per cent over 2015 -- market research firm Gartner said on Tuesday.

Consulting and IT outsourcing are currently the largest categories of spending on information security. 

Until the end of 2020, the highest growth is expected to come from security testing, IT outsourcing and data loss prevention (DLP), Gartner added.

"Organisations are increasingly focusing on detection and response, because taking a preventive approach has not been successful in blocking malicious attacks," said Elizabeth Kim, Senior Research Analyst, Gartner.

Preventive security will continue to show strong growth as many security practitioners continue to have a buying preference for preventive measures. 

However, solutions such as security information and event management (SIEM) and secure web gateways (SWGs) are evolving to support detection-and-response approaches. 

Gartner expects the SWG market will maintain its growth of five to 10 per cent through 2020 as organisations focus on detection and response.

Spending in security markets such as consumer security software, secure email gateways (SEGs) and endpoint protection platforms (EPPs) continues to show constrained growth due to commoditisation.

The average selling price for firewalls is expected to increase by at least 2 or 3 percent year over year until the end of 2018.

Half of midsize and large organisations will add bigger, more advanced inspection-oriented features to their network firewalls by 2019, the report added.