Cyber Security as a Service Market - Growth, Trends, and Forecasts (2022 - 2027)

The global cybersecurity as a service (CSaaS) market is expected to register a CAGR of 12.6% in the forecast period (2021 - 2026). The complexities that are associated with cybersecurity and the growing cyber threat are outstripping the abilities of most organizations. In current data compliance dominated economies, the legal complexities associated with protection and data security are far outside the remit and understanding of any IT expert.

Key Highlights

• Over the forecast period, the demand for CSaaS is expected to gain traction as it provides expertise and experience across people, processes, and technology, even encompassing a legal team with the expertise required to manage a breach from a compliance perspective. Also, CSaaS can be tailored to each organization's requirements from a strategic perspective to complete deployment.
• In addition to this, the global cyber threats are on the rise, and the costs associated with each data breach are also on the rise. According to RiskBased Security, during the first half of 2019, nearly 4.1 billion records were exposed. According to Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report 2020, about 71% of the breaches were financially motivated, and 25% were motivated by espionage.
• With the growing number of threats and data breaches, a serious concern for businesses worldwide is the loss of customer trust, which led to serious financial consequences for the companies. According to IBM, the average cost of lost business for organizations in 2019 stood at USD 1.42 million, and the total average cost stood at USD 3.92 million. The average time to identify a breach in 2019 was 206 days, and the average time to contain a breach was 73 days. This further leads to financial losses for a business.
• Among all of the data breaches and attacks, malicious attacks caused the majority of the data breaches during 2019. Also, the number of malicious attacks have increased exponentially in the last five years. Enterprises are the target of malicious attacks, and especially smaller organizations were attacked frequently. According to Symantec, smaller organizations with less than 250 employees had the highest target of malicious attacks with a malicious email rate of 1 in 323.
• Moreover, with the outbreak of COVID-19, the demand for cybersecurity as a service in the industry is surging, attracting enterprises to invest in either offering such solutions or expanding their service offering in the market further.
• Data breaches continue to be the most significant cybersecurity concern and likely to continue during the forecast period; thus, cybersecurity is a primary concern for enterprises and businesses. Apart from this, the industry sees a shortage in the cybersecurity skill gap, with nearly two in three organizations reporting a shortage in IT security staff across the world. This is one of the factors augmenting the demand for cybersecurity as a service.

Key Market Trends

Energy and Utility Sector Drive the Market Growth

• The energy and utility sector, globally, hosts a large share of critical infrastructure owned and operated by a country. Highly modernized and automated critical infrastructure, such as the electricity generation sector, oil and gas establishments, and water processing and treatment plants, are highly vulnerable to cyber and physical threats and have been easily targeted by hackers and evil organizations, and state actors.
• According to the Ponemon Institute Report, three-quarters of energy companies and utilities have experienced at least one recent data breach. The physical vulnerabilities for electric power are related to generation facilities, substations, and transmission lines. Large oil refineries are also primary targets. An increase in the transportation of oil through pipelines over the past decade offers a vast and largely unprotected target array. Oil and gas vulnerabilities include lines at river crossings, interconnects, pumps, valves, and compressors, and natural gas city gates.
• Many electric companies operating and protecting critical infrastructure require a strong working partnership. Further, power grid and energy security require private-public cooperation and regulatory coordination among industries, DHS, the Department of Defense (DOD), and the Department of Energy (DOE). The power grid and other industrial infrastructures have been increasingly subjected to both physical and cybersecurity attacks.
• Energy infrastructure industries are more susceptible to outbreaks, such as COVID-19, as such organizations handle a country's critical infrastructure, putting confidential business data and personnel information at risk.
• Energy sectors across the world are being targeted in a new campaign that weaponizes the COVID-19 outbreak. Among industrial targets, the energy sector, and particularly the electric power sector, have become prime targets.
• For instance, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation issued an alert warning that hackers, particularly the Xenotime group, which was responsible for an attack that jeopardized the safety of a Saudi petrochemical plant, began targeting the US power sector. In June, those types of threats prompted the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to approve a new, mandatory cybersecurity reporting rule.

North-America to Dominate the Market

• North America is the market leader in global cybersecurity as a service market globally in terms of market share due to the high level of digitalization and the rising number of connected devices. Also, the region leads globally as innovative technology adopters and has a significant presence of cybersecurity vendors contributing to the growth of the market. The increasing need among organizations to reduce the misuse of the internet, enhance employees' productivity, and address attacks on their IT infrastructures is expected to drive the growth of the CsaaS market in North America.
• There are also many companies in the region, contributing to the constant growth of the market in the region and expanding their services in the market. For instance, in January 2020, Accenture agreed to acquire Symantec's Cyber Security Services business from Broadcom Inc., which includes services, such as global threat monitoring and analysis through a network of security operation centers, real-time adversary and industry-specific threat intelligence, and incident response services.
• Moreover, by countries, data breaches in the United States continued to be expensive than those in other nations. Data breaches in the country, on average, cost to USD 8.19 million, which is nearly double that of the global average, and this increased by over 130% over the last 14 years.
• The NEC CIP regulation is already in place in the United States, focusing on security at the substation level. The Presidential Policy Directive 21 of the United States identified the energy sector as uniquely critical, as it provides an "enabling function" across all critical infrastructure sectors. In March 2019, the announcement of an office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response for the United States was made, with an allocation of USD 96 million.

Competitive Landscape

The competitive landscape of the global cybersecurity as a service market is competitive. The rapid adoption of cybersecurity as a service across the world has led many companies to innovate and develop cybersecurity solutions and services. Owing to the increased demand, many start-ups have emerged in the cybersecurity market to establish a significant presence in the market. Some of the key developments in the market are:

• In Feb 2020 - McAfee Inc. announced innovations to its cloud-native Mvision platform with the availability of Unified Cloud Edge(UCE), which provides unified data and threat protection from the device level to the cloud.

Additional Benefits:

• The market estimate (ME) sheet in Excel format
• 3 months of analyst support