Cybersecurity Budget Priorities 

Where are the Security Dollars Going First?

Erik Bradley | ETR Research  

| May 13, 2022

ETR’s most recent spending intentions survey (April 2022 TSIS) showed that cybersecurity yet again remains the highest budget priority for IT decision makers. This ranking has held the top spot since September of 2020, consistently besting Cloud Migration, Data Analytics, and Productivity/ Collaboration tools. Furthermore, the Information Security sector had the highest Pervasion score (citation representation in our survey group) at a record 74%.

With an estimated IT budget of more than $500 billion represented in our survey community, most of those dollars are flowing into the information security market. Our data further breaks down the sub-sectors within security that attract the highest investment levels. Without further ado, the sub-sector of security currently dominating our data charts is the next-gen EDR/XDR space.

While some may still be caught up arguing the marketing definitions of XDR, the investment dollars are already freely flowing into upgrading existing endpoint security, and vendors like CrowdStrike and Sentinel One that offer automated detection and response are leading the way. SentinelOne and CrowdStrike are number 1 and 2 respectively in overall Net Score and number 2 and 4 in Adoption percentage across the entire security sector.

Even more impressive, when compared to the entire survey universe of ~400 enterprise technology vendors (with at least 50 citations), SentinelOne also has the 4th highest Adoption percentage. Overall, SentinelOne and CrowdStrike both boast very high spending intention scores across the entire vendor universe that ETR tracks.

Coming in second, Identity Access Management, Privileged Account Management, and Identity Governance also show powerful spending intentions, with leading vendors like Okta, Auth0, SailPoint, and CyberArk all landing in the top ten of ETR’s overall Net Score metric (spending intentions) and Adoption percentage within Information Security. The identity triumvirate fares well compared to the larger enterprise tech landscape as well, with Okta, CyberArk, and SailPoint holding high spending intent scores and adoption percentages when compared amongst all vendors in the survey.

Lastly, an honorable mention goes out to the undisputed king of secure web gateway, Zscaler. No matter how they want to define themselves, the vendor continues to attract consistent spending intentions in our survey. The newly self-labeled Zero Trust Cloud Security vendor has the 5th highest spending intention score within ETR’s Information Security sector.