China will lead the way as organisations in the Asia-Pacifc (except Japan) spend more in IT security this year, according to IDC.
China will account more than 40 percent of total APAC security spending in 2021, and is is projected to take off at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.8 percent during the forecast period of 2019 to 2024.
Australia and India are the next two largest countries in terms of security spending due to the presence of large number of businesses catering to domestic and international customers.
Overall, spending on security hardware, services, and software is expected to reach US$23.1 billion in 2021, an increase of 12.6 percent over the previous year.
IDC expects investment on security related products and services to grow at a five-year CAGR of 13.3 percent and reach US$35 billion by 2024. This growth is driven by increased cloud adoption, massive WFH migration and transformation projects by enterprises to overcome operational challenges.
The banking, telecommunications, and federal/central and state/local government sectors are expected to lead the charge in response to being more targeted by threat actors for fraud, cybercrime and breaches. They will account for half of the total security spending.
Industries that are spending more this year are state/local government (18.5 percent), transportation (13.9 percent), and retail (13.7 percent).
“2020 defined the importance of digital for everyone globally, but it also highlighted shortcomings in security strategies. While leading organisations are starting to adopt a more platform-based approach, the majority are still buying point-solutions to address specific concerns. This majority needs to change their mindset and invest more strategically into their security architectures,” said Simon Piff, Vice President of Trust, Security, and Blockchain Research at IDC Asia/Pacific.
Services will be both the largest and the fastest growing category among security markets, accounting for almost half of security spending throughout the forecast period at a 13.4 percent five-year CAGR. The most significant will be managed security services, which is predicted to devliver around 40 percent of the security services spending throughout the forecast. As the IT environment becomes more diverse and complex, enterprises are more dependent on managed service providers for security.
Security hardware will be the second largest of the security market, dominated by network security needs, including firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, unified threat management, and virtual private networks.
Security software spending is led by endpoint security, and identity and digital trust software, delivering more than half of the overall security software spend in 2021. The key driving force is the need to protect devices and networks used by remote work force from cyberattacks.
Photo: Edward Lim
Entelechy Asia 