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Dell'Oro prices AI systems security at two cents on the enterprise AI dollar
Dell'Oro forecasts nearly $8bn of AI systems security revenue by 2030 against an enterprise AI systems base of nearly $400bn, with about 60 vendors already selling guardrails, red-teaming and agent security. The same report still covers cloud-native security.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Dell'Oro Group forecasts the AI systems security market to grow from essentially zero to nearly $8bn by 2030 as enterprises move AI applications, models and agents into production.
- Nearly 60 vendors already sell into the category across model and component security, AI validation and red teaming, AI security posture management, runtime guardrails and agent security.
- Wiz, which Dell'Oro lists under Google, held the top CNAPP revenue share spot in 2025, followed by Microsoft, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks.
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Why it matters
- constraint Nearly $8bn split across about 60 vendors is roughly $133m each in 2030, so the forecast supports a consolidation wave better than it supports 60 independent companies.
- exposure Specialists raising on the $8bn number are exposed to the four vendors that led CNAPP share in 2025 attaching guardrails to renewals those vendors already hold.
- contradiction Dell'Oro calls this a new security category while keeping it in one report with CNAPP and pointing at many of the same operational buyers, so the case for a separate procurement line is weaker than the headline figure suggests.
Nearly $8bn of security revenue in 2030 against a base of nearly $400bn of enterprise AI systems spend works out at two cents of security per dollar of production AI [1][6][10]. Dell'Oro's April 2026 edition ties the security forecast to that production base instead of public cloud spending [6][15]. Two percent is small enough that buyers are not choosing between model budget and security budget; they are adding a line on top of the $400bn [6][10].
The closest thing Dell'Oro publishes to a precedent is CNAPP, which reached nearly $4bn in 2025 on a five-year growth rate above 60 percent a year [8]. That came off a small base: nearly $4bn divided by 1.6 five times over is about $380m in 2020 [12]. AI systems security is being asked to reach twice CNAPP's 2025 size in the same five-year span, from essentially nothing [13][1].
Mauricio Sanchez, senior director for enterprise security and networking at Dell'Oro, said "Enterprise AI spend is moving beyond chat and copilots into systems that retrieve data, call tools, maintain memory, and take action, creating a new security category around the AI system itself" [3]. The report itself is drawn across both categories. Dell'Oro renamed it from the Cloud Workload Security Advanced Research Report to the AI and Cloud-native Security Advanced Research Report, kept CNAPP inside it, and cited "shared lifecycle workflows, and many of the same operational buyers" [5]. Wiz (Google) led CNAPP revenue share in 2025, ahead of Microsoft, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks [9].
Dell'Oro expects runtime and control to become the decisive battleground, as prompts, retrieved context, outputs, tool calls, memory and agent action chains need continuous observation and enforcement [7]. Inline enforcement favours whoever already sits in the traffic path, and the CNAPP leaders do [9]. The second case is that the buying centre moves, and the team that owns the model buys validation and red-teaming on its own purchase order. The third is that the money never separates in the accounts at all and gets reported inside cloud-native security. I'd put most weight on the third through 2027.
What would break that view is a pure-play specialist disclosing nine figures of AI systems security revenue before 2028, or a CNAPP share table in which the 2025 leaders lose position to vendors founded after 2023 [9]. Dell'Oro did not break the $8bn out by vendor type, though it says the report covers the roles of hyperscalers, portfolio security vendors and pure-play specialists [18]. For a specialist raising money now, the $8bn is a 2030 slide, and the same forecast puts today's revenue for the category at essentially zero [1].
What to watch
- Whether Dell'Oro's next edition shows the regional split of AISS revenue across North America, EMEA, Asia Pacific excluding China, China and CALA.
- Whether the vendor count moves off about 60 as the M&A activity Dell'Oro tracks in the same report picks up.
- Whether the broader AI Security and Governance opportunity, which Dell'Oro distinguishes from AISS, gets a forecast of its own.