Increasing security breaches amid skill shortage will push enterprise spending on information security products and services in India to reach $1.7 billion in 2018, Gartner said on Thursday.

This is an increase of 12.5% from 2017. In 2019, the market is forecast to hit $1.9 billion.

"Continued focus on building detection and response capabilities are bolstering security spending in India," said Siddharth Deshpande, Research Director at Gartner.

"High-impact security incidents in India, like the recent incident with Cosmos Bank, reinforce the need for organisations to treat security and risk management as a top business priority," Deshpande added.

There are five key enterprise security product segments that will bolster growth in 2019: Integrated risk management software (26.6 per cent growth); data security (12.4 per cent); infrastructure protection (11.7 per cent); identity and access management (10.9 per cent) and network security equipment (10.3 per cent).

The security services market in India will grow from $885 million in 2018 to $1 billion in 2019 -- an increase of 13% year-on-year.

"Chief information security officers (CISOs) are increasingly concerned about the quality of security services currently available, creating an opportunity for new security services providers that can offer higher quality services," said Deshpande.

Security incidents often happen because organisations do not pay attention to basic security hygiene.

"Continued breaches reinforce the need for chief information officers (CIOs) and CISOs to view sensitive data and IT systems as critical infrastructure and prevent, detect and respond to incidents appropriately," Deshpande added.