On A Roll: Cybersecurity Takes the Center Stage

In the wake of organized and large-scale cyber-attacks and multiple incidences of data breaches, organizations have started taking the topic of cybersecurity more seriously and started revisiting their security postures to gauge their preparedness to deal with such attacks.

In a majority of the cases, reputational damage is an even more concerning factor for the organizations than the security breach itself. Besides this, regulatory compliance requirements are also forcing organizations to take a hard look at their security postures and take remedial actions, wherever necessary.

Gartner forecasts that by 2020, more than 60 percent of organizations will invest in multiple data security tools such as data loss prevention, encryption and data-centric audit and protection tools, up from approximately 35 percent today.

Malware and ransomware outbreaks such as WannaCry, Petya, and NotPetya and the financial organization breaches had a direct impact on the security spends of the organizations in 2017. Data Privacy concerns and the regulatory changes like the European Union’s (EU) Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) also spurred the security spends to a great deal last year.

Market Dynamics

Industry estimates say that the total information security market in India was roughly USD 1.6 billion in 2017. As per ResearchAndMarkets.com estimates, India cybersecurity market is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 19 percent during 2018-2023. Gartner expects the spending on information security products and services in India will grow to USD 1.7 billion in 2018.

Growth in the market is expected to be driven by increasing pace of digitization across the public and private sectors. The growing complexity in enterprise architecture due to the adoption of Social, Mobile, Cloud and IoT technologies, as well as the need to comply with stringent regulatory requirements, are also driving the demand for cybersecurity solutions and services across the country.

The enterprise cybersecurity market is comprised of the offerings in three key areas- Security Software, Security Hardware and Security Services. Hardware support services growth will see a decline due to the adoption of virtual appliances, public cloud and software as a service (SaaS). Studies suggest that security services will continue to be the fastest growing segment, especially IT outsourcing, consulting and implementation services. A breakdown of the organizations’ information security spending patterns shows that the ‘security services’ segment is projected to make up nearly 60 percent of the total IT security budgets, followed by the ‘infrastructure protection’ segment on a little over 18 percent.

Vendor Play

Enterprise security market is vast and hence, fragmented in nature. In terms of security type, the market can be divided into Network security, Endpoint security, Application security, Cloud security, Wireless security, and Others (database security and web security), which are addressed by a plethora of solutions such as Identity and access management (IAM), Risk and compliance management, Encryption, Data loss prevention (DLP), Unified threat management (UTM), Firewall, Antivirus/anti-malware, Intrusion detection system (IDS)/intrusion prevention system (IPS), Security and vulnerability management, Disaster recovery, Distributed denial of service (DDOS) mitigation, Security information and event management (SIEM), etc. and services.

Some of the key vendors in the enterprise security market in India are RSA, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro, Fortinet, FireEye, Sophos, F5 Networks, Check Point Software Technologies, etc. For instance, companies like F5 Networks, which is a key player in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) and Web Application Firewalls sees a lot of traction in web application firewalls across all verticals in India, together with solutions for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, as attacks are going beyond being volumetric to being more focused on applications.

Security experts say that Digital transformation will result in a rise in the number of applications being used, which will require increased application security. Organizations are looking to employ more agile application delivery systems, as they make use of cloud for specific purposes such as Artificial Intelligence and IoT- in fact, multi-cloud is today’s reality. Our focus is on multi-cloud application security, which translates into helping our customers protect their applications by ensuring a consistent security policy across a company’s datacenter internally and externally – by Thinking App Security First!

Fortinet, which is a key player in the network security segment sees the next wave of growth coming from the expanding cloud security market, and the future requirement of securing critical infrastructure (OT) and IoT technologies.

Rajesh Maurya, Regional VP, India & SAARC at Fortinet said, “There is an incredible urgency to counter today’s attacks with a security transformation that mirrors digital transformation efforts. Yesterday’s solutions, working individually, are not adequate. Point products and static defense must give way to integrated and automated solutions that operate at speed and scale. With the Fortinet Security Fabric partners, we can create a collaborative ecosystem not only with Fortinet’s own extensive portfolio of security and networking technologies, but also include third-party partners in the cloud, software-defined networking, sandboxing, testing, security information and event management (SIEM), and Single Sign-On technologies.”

In 2018, Trend Micro, a key player in the endpoint security solutions segment, will be focused on giving proactive protection to customers in any vertical, be it server security, endpoint security and network security. Nilesh Jain, VP-South East Asia and India, Trend Micro said, “In India, we are seeing two trends, very specifically to large enterprises. One is the adoption of new technologies of AI, Big Data & Blockchain.

Secondly, it’s the cloud adoption related migration happening across sectors. Also, customers are increasingly evaluating vendors who can deliver Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), as well as who can deliver security on the cloud, and move on those latest technologies faster. We are working very closely with India’s leading Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) such as Microsoft Azure and AWS to provide dynamic, adaptive protection for datacenter and cloud environments. Our Hybrid Cloud security offering is a strong growth area in APAC, including India. Due to the development of IOT, our focus is also going to be on the Security Operations Center (SOC). The SOC may be owned by the customers or outsourced, but we will support both.

Gaurav Agarwal, MD, India & SAARC, Symantec said, ”We have an extensive portfolio to protect the organizations through their digital transformation journey. Our security services capability will help enterprises to keep up with the latest tool and technology. Besides helping organizations in the BFSI, and government space, securing the smart cities is a key focus area or us in India. Our investment in the SoC in Chennai this year is also a high growth area for us.” Symantec’s SOCs provides protection against advanced cyber threats in an increasingly connected world and are powered by a large civilian threat intelligence network, harnessing the power of AI and ML to comb through trillions of telemetry elements.

Market Outlook

As more and more companies move their applications to the cloud, and increasingly embrace multi-cloud environments, the need to secure the cloud-based workloads will grow further. In a modern hybrid datacenter, providers address the requirements of workload protection architecture that reach physical, virtual machines (VMs) and various public cloud environments. Hybrid cloud workload protection platforms (CWPP) provide organizations with an integrated way to manage policies and protect multiple workloads using a single management console. Cloud access security brokers (CASBs) address gaps in security resulting from the significant increase in cloud service and mobile usage. CASBs provide information security professionals with a single point of control over multiple cloud service concurrently, for any user or device.

Organizations will also prefer a network-based approach to identify advanced attacks that have bypassed perimeter security. Network traffic analysis (NTA) solutions monitor network traffic, flows, connections and objects for behaviors indicative of malicious intent.

Going forward, enterprise security budgets will gradually shift more towards the security monitoring, early detection and response. Managed detection and response (MDR) services will be popular among the organizations, who don’t have a dedicated budget for threat detection capabilities. MDR providers deliver threat detection, incident response and continuous-monitoring capabilities, but don’t have the expertise or resources to do it on their own.

However, skills gap and the lack of technical expertise to deal with the complex and ever-changing threat landscape will force organizations to look for managed security service providers and outsourcers. The IT outsourcing segment is the second-largest security spending segment after consulting and will grow further in the coming years also.

MSSPs offer a wide range of security services, from setting up infrastructure through security management or incident response. Some offer full outsourcing of an enterprise’s information security program. MSSPs ensure that enterprise IT is always up-to-date with the status of security issues, audits, and maintenance, enabling the organizations to focus more on their core business.