Enterprise information security & risk management spending in India to grow 9.5% in 2021: Gartner

Enterprise information security and risk management end user spending in India is on pace to total USD 2.08 billion in 2021, an increase of 9.5% from 2020, according to the latest forecast from Gartner.

“The overnight move to remote-working in reaction to the pandemic exposed organizations’ vulnerabilities” said Prateek Bhajanka, senior principal research analyst at Gartner. “While security leaders had to cut-down on their security spending in 2020 because of IT budget-cuts, in 2021, this trend is reversing. A secure digital environment is now foundational to organizations’ growth and in preparation to another crisis that may arise. Security leaders are ready to reinvest in cybersecurity with a renewed and refreshed rigor.”

In 2021, organizations are expected to increase their spending across all segments of security and risk management. Continuing the trend from last year, cloud security and integrated risk management will experience the highest growth in 2021, up 251% and 27.8%, respectively (see Table).

Table: Enterprise Information Security & Risk Management End User Spending by Segment, India, 2020-2021 (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

Source: Gartner (March 2021)

Shift to cloud drives triple-digit spending on cloud security

“India is at an early stage of cloud adoption and the pandemic only accelerated this shift as organizations moved to the cloud to achieve cost efficiency and business continuity,” said Bhajanka. “In 2020, hyperscalers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, increased their investment in data centers in India, further catalyzing Indian organizations’ move to cloud during the pandemic.”

CISOs and security leaders are aware of the risks and vulnerabilities that their organizations can be exposed to while migrating to cloud from legacy systems. To manage these risks, organizations are increasing their spending on cloud security tools, driving the market up 251.1% in 2021. Cloud access security brokers (CASB) and cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) will be some of the major technologies that CISOs in India will increase their spending on within the cloud security segment in 2021.

In addition, Indian CISOs and security leaders will focus on establishing and deploying threat detection and response programs and capabilities, such as endpoint detection and response (EDR),and move to cloud delivered security capabilities to have consistent security coverage whether working from office, home or off-site.