Report: Machine learning and AI waves are driving security analytics market to $12B by 2024

Businesses and organizations are always under the threat of cyberattacks, which means they must constantly update their security tool sets.

While better security is a familiar refrain, new technologies and services, such as all of those IoT sensors, will lead to even more cybersecurity risks for businesses and service providers—all of which will drive the security analytics market toward revenue of $12 billion by 2024, according to ABI research.

In the "spy vs. spy" world of cybersecurity, the telecom industry is increasingly looking towards advanced data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence as the means for combating the various attacks.

“The increased frequency and sophistication of cyber-attacks are causing the security ecosystem to flourish and push the industry into the hunt for more reliable, in-depth, and high-quality security analytics intelligence,” said Dimitrios Pavlakis, industry analyst for ABI Research, in a prepared statement. “Most organizations understand security analytics as an elusive cluster of different technologies encompassing ‘a little bit of everything.' While on a top level they are somewhat correct on that respect, they, unfortunately, opt to pick whatever makes sense budget-wise.

“The issue is not only that they choose a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) over security, but also have unrealistic expectations about the intelligence-gathering and the level of cybersecurity readiness of their chosen solution.”

The problem, according to ABI's Pavlakis, is that most organizations don't take the time to understand what the prerequisites are for reliable sources of security intelligence. Instead, some of them tend to pick just one intelligence-gathering aspect of certain vital security tools.

ABI Research’s latest market report says that the security analytics ecosystem must evolve towards providing truly interoperable solutions powered by advanced security analytics. This includes, among others, an amalgamation of intelligence gathered from security information and event management (SIEM) systems, user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), intrusion detection or prevention systems (IDS/IPS), unified threat management (UTM), next-generation firewalls, and a steady stream of API data from cloud vendors.

All of those tools should be bundled in with new technologies  such as cognitive computing and natural language processing (NPL) classifiers. Some of the key players, each with a different specialization in security analytics, include IBM, Cisco, and LogRhythm, and well as vendors such as Crowdstrike, McAfee, Dartrace, and empow.

Service providers also play a key role in the cybersecurity realm by providing some of the elements that ABI Research outlined. According to International Data Corporation's updated Worldwide Semiannual Security Spending Guide, managed security services is the largest segment within the security services category.

According to IDC, the telecommunications industry is projected to have the fastest growth in security spending with a CAGR of 13%, followed by state and local government (12% CAGR) and the resource industry (12% CAGR).

RELATED: CenturyLink fortifies businesses' security with Managed Palo Alto Firewall

Service providers such as AT&T, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom and CenturyLink, and telecom vendors have in-depth security offerings for their commercial and residential customers.

CenturyLink announced yesterday it had added Palo Alto Networks' next-generation firewalls into its Security Log Monitoring service. In August, Cisco doled out $2.35 billion in cash and assumed equity awards to buy cloud-native and software-as-a-service vendor Duo Security.