Spending on security products is forecast to grow by 7 percent this year, or a hefty $6.5 billion, as enterprises become increasingly wary of cybersecurity threats in the wake of several high-profile ransomware attacks earlier this year.

Gartner Inc. said it its latest forecast that the global market for information security products and services will top $86.4 billion by the end of this year, before rising to $93 billion by the end of 2018. The nascent security testing market will see some of the biggest gains, the analyst firm said.

Two forces are driving the demand for security products and services, Gartner said. These include pending data governance regulations such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, set to come into force next year, and the evolution of security threats such as ransomware attacks. Those attacks have hit a number of enterprises in the last few months, including Japan’s Honda Motor Co. Ltd. and the South Korean web hosting company Nayana Inc., which reportedly paid out a $1 million ransom to regain access to data that was encrypted by the hackers.

Gartner said that as awareness of the need for information technology security grows, companies are increasingly investing in application testing tools as a way of baking security into their apps and infrastructure deployments. Organizations are particularly keen to secure so-called microservices, which are used to deliver distributed applications to mobile workers.

One of the fastest-growing security products is application security testing tools, which are used to stress test applications before they’re deployed into production.

Gartner also said security services, which include IT outsourcing and other implementation services, will steal market share from traditional hardware-based support services. That reflects a growing trend among enterprises toward software-defined infrastructure, such as the public cloud, at the expense of on-premises architectures, Gartner said.

The analyst firm said that the rise of threats such as ransomware and malware has removed any lingering complacency about the need to beef up security. It also said that the shift toward the public cloud is heightening security fears, citing a statement by Microsoft Corp. that the frequency of attacks on cloud users increased by almost 300 percent in the past year alone.

“Rising awareness among CEOs and boards of directors about the business impact of security incidents and an evolving regulatory landscape have led to continued spending on security products and services,” said Gartner Principal Research Analyst Sid Deshpande. “As seen in the recent spate of global security incidents, doing the basics right has never been more important. Organizations can improve their security posture significantly just by addressing basic security and risk related hygiene elements like threat centric vulnerability management, centralized log management, internal network segmentation, backups and system hardening.”

Gartner also said the EU’s incoming GDPR regulations will drive 65 percent of data loss prevention product purchases through 2018.

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