APAC to spend nearly $30b on protecting against cyberattacks

CYBERSECURITY has been a challenge for most businesses this past year.

Every quarter has been more challenging than the next — with organizations battling one incident after another. Naturally, they’re keen on spending more to boost security against bad actors.

From Cathay Pacific to Mariott to Boeing, we’ve seen hacks across a diverse range of industries and company sizes in the past.

This has definitely caused significant challenges for businesses in the market, and companies seem to want to do everything in their power to prevent more of these in the future.

According to the latest IDC spending guide, the Asia Pacific (APAC) companies will invest up to US$16 billion in security-related hardware, software, and services, an increase of 20 percent over the previous year.

IDC expects investment on security-related products and services to grow at a five-year CAGR of 20.1 percent over the forecast period (2017-22) and reach USD 28.2 billion by 2022.

“For too long, business leaders were underinvesting in this category. We see this changing lately but a bit late to be able to find the needed skills in the market, hence the incremental growth expected in the services segment,” said IDC VP for Security and Blockchain Research Simon Piff.

“Governments prioritizing this as part of their agenda is good, but it could also be backed by better legislation in many markets.”

Spending on security not limited to software alone

IDC believes that security-related services will be both the largest (US$6.5 billion in 2019) and the fastest growing (23.8 percent CAGR) category of APEJ security spending.

Managed security services are expected to be the largest segment within the services category, delivering more than 46 percent of the technology category throughout the forecast (2017-22).

Security hardware will the second largest category with a 36.2 percent share of the overall security spend in 2019.

In fact, analysts forecast that network security hardware will be the largest hardware segment throughout the forecast period.

Software spends are expected to account for 23.0 percent of the overall security spend in 2019 and might grow at five-year CAGR of 12.2 percent during 2017-22.

Looking into the industries that demand security

IDC’s analysts believe that the banking industry will make the largest investment in security solutions. Spends this year will total US$2.4 billion and grow to US$4.2 billion by 2022.

Primarily, this growth will be led by managed security services and network security that account for more than half of the industry’s spend throughout the forecast.

With pressure from the government and customers to combat threats targeting customer accounts and IT infrastructure mounting, the industry seems to be in a rush to spend on solutions specifically designed to protect them in the event of an attack.

Following this, telecommunications and federal & central government are the other two shaping industries, representing a 23.2 percent share of the overall security spend in 2019.

The industries that will see the fastest growth in security spending will be state/local governments (23.7 percent CAGR) and resource industries (22.2 percent CAGR), according to IDC.

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