Security

The India IT Security market is on the threshold of a boom. Thanks to the ever-changing threat landscape that calls for radical new ways of managing the IT security infrastructure

Security threats are going up by the day. No wonder, many enterprises are creating separate digital security organizations and hiring CISOs and CDOs to manage the security complexities as they embark on digital transformation initiatives.

MARKET DYNAMICS

Enterprise security spending ( hardware, software, and services) in India is on pace to reach $1.12 billion in 2016, up 10.6% from $1.01 billion in 2015, according to Gartner. According to analysts, they say that security spending will continue to grow in 2017 and of which security services will take a lion’s share as we move forward. Security services encompass consulting, implementation, support and managed security services. Gartner says that the strong growth in the security services market will be primarily due to custom- ers’ need for external services to transform their security posture in the digital business era. Security services are typically categorized as either implementation, consulting or security outsourcing services, and many providers are beginning to offer all three categories to address customer requirements.

Analysts like Gartner say that the key security initiatives for a majority of organizations in 2016 included: security operations, incident response network and data center security, identity governance and administration, mobile and cloud security governance, advanced threat defense, application security, security policy and program development and governance, risk and compliance (GRC). Mature organizations that have begun the journey towards detection and response approaches are now looking to focus on advanced capabilities around security operations and incident response.

Several organizations in India are now realizing that a pure technology centric approach to their security strategy will not suffice. As a result, many organizations are beginning to pay equal emphasis on the people and process elements. In the context of digital business, the people and process elements of security and risk management are becoming extremely important.

A Gartner global report forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30% from 2015, and will reach 20.8 billion by 2020. In 2016, 5.5 million new things will get connected every day. Gartner estimates that total services spending of $235 billion in 2016, up 22% from 2015. Services are dominated by the professional category (in which businesses contract with

With the digital transformation wave currently sweeping the IT landscape has jump started the security market

external providers in order to design, install and operate IoT systems), however, connectivity services (through communications service providers) and consumer services will grow at a faster pace.

What happened in FY 17 is the escalation of the thinking that security is no longer an after thought, it has to be integrated with the overall IT strategy and should clearly manifest enterprise wide and be proactive to multiple threat scenarios. Right from end points to data protection to firewalls- a comprehensive integrated approach is needed. So clearly in an integrated approach, there are many configurations. One can have multiple niche vendors who are experts in security sub domains or a Unified Threat Management (UTM) approach can be taken. But remember that security has to be tailor-made and one solution does not fit all or addresses all security pangs and pain areas.

Per se if one looks at domains like UTM, according to IDC, the trend for growth in the worldwide market is driven by the UTM sub-market continues, with UTM almost tripling its size over the last five years reaching record high revenues of $5.7 billion for 2016 and year-overyear growth of 17.3%, the highest growth among all sub-markets. The UTM market represents today almost 50% of the worldwide revenues in the security appliance market. The Firewall and Content Management sub-markets also had positive year-over-year revenue growth in 2016 with gains of 10.4% and 4%, respectively. The Intrusion Detection and Prevention and Virtual Private Network (VPN) sub-markets experienced weakening revenues in 2016 with year-over-year declines of 4.8% and 4.3%, respectively.

KEY TRENDS

Going by a white paper by Morgan Stanley titled – Cyber Security: Time for a Paradigm Shift, it said, “Companies are spending more to safeguard their digital assets, but cybercrimes are still growing in frequency and severity. What’s needed now isn’t more security, but better security.”The paper also stated that given the growing severity and frequency of cyberattacks, it’s no surprise that organizations of all sizes are spending more money to shore up their digital defenses. The market for cybersecurity products and services is expected to surpass $60 billion in 2016, and that figure could double by 2020.

OUTLOOK

With the digital transformation wave currently sweeping the IT landscape has jump started the security market. Analysts say that many companies still have a reactive approach to security and hence they struggle to bounce back when they fall victim to security attack, whether it be ransomware or any other data breach. What is needed is a complete rethink of the security processes and practices that enable one to deploy a security policy that is in sync with the threat landscape. This is what is driving the security market right now. Clearly, the time has come to seamlessly blend the appliance, software, online et al to create a ‘Security One’ infrastructure that will make the way for a proactive digital security backbone as we move forward.