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Enterprise information security spending in India is on pace to total USD 1.86 billion in 2019, an increase of 12.4% from 2018, according to the latest forecast from Gartner.
“The growth of enterprise spending on information security in India will continue to grow unabated to reach over USD 2 billion in 2020,” said Prateek Bhajanka, principal research analyst at Gartner. “The increased awareness on the benefits of risk assessment and the acknowledgement that security is one of the enablers of digital transformation are boosting enterprise security spending in India. In addition, the rise in advanced cyberattacks, ransomware and malware attacks has put cybersecurity as a top investment priority for Indian CISOs, therefore increasing spending on security locally.”
“Local CISOs and security leaders are investing in advanced threat detection programs and capabilities like endpoint detection and response (EDR) and user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) to help detect attacks and breaches in their IT infrastructure,” said Bhajanka.
Security services will attract the most spending from CISOs and security leaders in 2019 as local organizations are emphasizing on threat detection, compliance and security hygiene. In 2019, security services will represent 51.5% of the total enterprise information security spending in India (see Table 1.)
Cloud Security and Integrated Risk Management Are Fastest Growing Segments in 2019
Enterprise spending on cloud security is expected to total USD 4 million in 2019, an increase of 300% from 2018. “The Personal Data Protection bill which is likely to be accepted by the Indian parliament in 2019 and the Indian government’s initiatives like ‘Digital India’ and ‘Smart City’ are increasing net-new adopters of cloud. In addition, Indian organizations are increasingly using cloud-specific security tools such as cloud access security broker (CASB) solutions for threat prevention, data loss prevention and compliance requirements, which is fueling the tripe-digit growth of cloud security in India,” said Rustam Malik, principal research analyst at Gartner.
In 2019, integrated risk management solutions will be the second fastest growing segment, achieving a 23.1% increase year over year. “Online payments rose since demonetization in 2016 and led to an increase in investments toward IT infrastructure security,” said Bhajanka. “The move to digital business is also forcing CISOs to increase their spending on managing risks arising from cyberattacks and non-compliance.”
Incidents of privacy breaches have put an increasing pressure on the role of CISOs in India to secure data, address privacy concerns and create secured IT infrastructure for online transactions. Local regulatory bodies have mandated Indian organizations to store critical data in local data centres to ensure better monitoring of data, confidentiality and data security. In addition, Indian CISOs are also concerned about compliance issues that will arise with the implementation of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
In 2020, cloud security, integrated risk management and data security will continue to be the highest growing segments among local businesses. “CISOs need to focus on developing a data security governance framework which will help mitigate the risks caused by security threats, data residency and privacy issues,” said Malik. “Investment in password-less authentication technologies should be one of the focus areas as we are seeing a spike in attacks arising from exploitation of user credentials.”
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