A new paper by research firm Canalys predicts that global cybersecurity spending will grow by 10% in 2021, to $60.2 billion, as VentureBeat reports. Threats will expand and the pace of attacks won’t slow down. Canalys’ worst-case scenario, with a longer and steeper economic drop due to the coronavirus pandemic, still envisions a 6.6% increase in cybersecurity spending.
The researcher's projections include spending on “endpoint security, network security, web and email security, data security, vulnerability and security analytics, and identity access management.”
More dramatically, Dan Ives, a senior tech analyst at Wedbush Securities, has forecast a 20% “seismic increase” in cybersecurity expenditures, as Business Insider reports. Over the short run, Ives projects the recent SolarWind hack of government agencies and private companies will specifically boost advanced threat detection, zero trust architecture, data security, and identity security.
Citing a “perfect storm of demand,” Ives said, “We believe there is a $200 billion growth opportunity in cloud security 'up for grabs' over the next five years for those vendors that have the solution sets to protect critical cloud deployments and seamlessly work with on premise and public/ hybrid workloads through a unified and deep solution set.”
Meanwhile, as TheStreet.com notes, Mizuho Bank analyst Gregg Moskowitz, covering enterprise software firms, has predicted that the SolarWinds hack will “elevate C-level/Board conversations and trigger additional [security] spend from governments and organizations in 2021.” What’s more, D.A. Davidson & Co. analyst Andrew Nowinski recently upgraded his stock ratings for Fortinet and CyberArk to Buy, noting an uptick in demand due to the SolarWinds hack.
According to Risk Based Security’s newly released 2020 year-end data breach report, while the total volume of security incidents declined last year, the amount of breached records surged, as Security Boulevard notes. The number of ransomware attacks doubled last year, the report finds.