Gartner has predicted the global cloud-based security services market will hit $5.9 billion this year, saying the segment’s growth will ‘remain strong’.

The analyst firm looked at a variety of segments, with identity and access management (IAM), identity as a service (IDaaS) and user authentication remaining the biggest category. Gartner predicts this area to comprise $2.1bn, or 35.6% of the overall market, this year, going up to $3.42bn, or 38.3% of the overall $8.92bn market by 2020.

Secure email gateway ($702m) and secure web gateway ($707m) were the next largest categories, with the latter expecting to outstrip the former to the tune of almost $100m by 2020. Application security testing, at almost $400m ($397.3m) this year, leads the remaining categories, ahead of security information and event management (SIEM) at $359m and remote vulnerability assessment at $250m. Other cloud-based security services amounted to $1.3bn.

The announcement, which took place during the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit this week, also examined the landscape for businesses of different sizes. SMBs are driving growth as they become more aware of security threats, while enterprises are also on board as they realise the operational benefits derived from a cloud-based security delivery model.

“Cloud-based delivery models will remain a popular choice for security practices, with deployment expanding further to controls, such as cloud-based sandboxing and WAFs (web application firewalls),” said Ruggero Contu, research director at Gartner.

“The ability to leverage security controls that are delivered, updated and managed through the cloud – and therefore require less time-consuming and costly implementations and maintenance activities – is of significant value to enterprises,” Contu added.

This complements a report issued by fellow analyst firm Forrester Research earlier this month, which said cloud security spending would hit $3.5 billion by 2021 at a 28% annual growth rate.