Companies, both large and small, have a need for good cybersecurity. Not only that, but some of them might also wish to invest in the industry itself. Although we are going to concentrate on practical reasons, there is no doubt that the cybersecurity market is growing at a rapid rate. With so many threats in the world, this shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. A general shortage of cybersecurity workers definitely doesn’t help matters, either. That’s why companies need to invest time as well as money into proper cybersecurity preparation. Let’s talk a little more about why it is so important to invest in these matters.
How Big Is The Cybersecurity Industry?
As a result of greater demand, the cybersecurity industry has grown at an exponential rate over the last few years. We think this is partly because of the fact that physical crime has become much harder to do without getting caught. The use of cameras, audio bugs, and other covert monitoring devices creates a lot more risk for such operations. As such, it is no wonder that so many criminals are moving their crimes to the digital world.
According to various sources, the value of the cybersecurity industry is climbing rapidly. However, the numbers vary from one source to another, so we will give you a couple of different sets of figures. For instance, this report from Statista is a good place to start. We can see that the total value of this market was about 167 billion dollars in 2019. By 2020, that figure goes up to a little more than 184 billion, which is an increase of roughly 17 billion dollars. From 2018 to 2019, we see an increase of about 15.5 billion, and this trend repeats itself across the board.
This gives us some good insight, but we need one more source. According to Forbes, the global cybersecurity market is worth about 173 billion dollars at present and is expected to increase by 7-8% annually. This trend is expected to hold until 2026, but that is just an estimate. If that estimate holds true, that would mean an increase of roughly 12 billion per year. So, as you can see, our numbers vary a little bit. However, they aren’t that far off from each other, and all of them show a continuous upward trend until at least 2026.
The Biggest Incidents Of 2019
Now we come to the biggest reason for which every company needs to invest in cybersecurity. Cyber attacks are bigger and more common than ever, and no business is too small or large to be victimized. In fact, some say that small businesses are more likely to get targeted (because they are easier targets).
2019 had quite a few of these high-profile incidents. For instance, Quest diagnostics discovered a severe data breach last year, which mainly affected one of their business partners. The personal and financial information of nearly 12 million customers was exposed, so the damage was quite extensive. The company that suffered the breach (AMCA) filed for bankruptcy not long after that, and it was obvious that the data breach took them down.
Credit giant Capital One also suffered a damaging data breach this past year. Nearly 100 million users across the U.S. and Canada had their information stolen, and a lot of that information was used to carry out acts of bank fraud. Federal regulators found that Capital One was negligent in its cybersecurity precautions and subsequently fined the company for 80 million dollars. If they were not such a large and well-established company, they probably would have gone bankrupt as well.
Investing In New Workers
In spite of the growing threat, cybersecurity jobs are not being filled fast enough. This is partly due to the huge growth of the industry, which we have already documented for you. With so much growth in an industry that requires highly educated people, a labor shortfall is a natural consequence.
This is why companies need to invest in training and certification programs for IT people. These programs can churn out the kinds of expert workers that will be needed for the future of online commerce. Unfortunately, there is currently no standardization in the field of IT education, and everyone is just left to play a guessing game.
If you have an employee who shows promise in this department, you should invest in that person and give them the tools to go from a casual hobbyist to a professional expert. In the end, that will make them more valuable to you, and we have already seen how expensive data breaches can be! If that worker prevents even one breach, they will have earned their keep nicely.
Every Relevant Metric Is Climbing
One reason for the diversity of values (in terms of market growth and value) is the fact that there is more than one way to measure these things. Some people measure it by the amount of money that people are known to have spent on cybersecurity, while others base it on the value of the most prominent cybersecurity companies. However, all of these numbers have one thing in common: They are all climbing rapidly. When all the experts in a particular field are predicting this, you would be foolish to ignore that trend.
Future Prospects
No one really knows what the future will bring, but it seems that ransomware is the fastest-growing threat. There aren’t a whole lot of ways to deal with this threat at present, and that is why hackers continue to use this method. However, the use of efficient and secure auto-backup systems has proven to be pretty effective. Is it enough? Probably not. As such, we predict that the cybersecurity industry will continue to focus a lot of effort on the mitigation of ransomware threats.
As encryption becomes more and more common, we also predict that we will see a lot fewer “brute force” attacks, as they are pretty easy to defeat. Instead, you will probably see a lot more social engineering attacks, as well as attacks on vulnerable ISPs. Most standard ISPs do not take sufficient precautions on the server end, so we may also see large growth in the use of managed service providers. Such providers tend to be a little more expensive but provide much better network security.
Conclusion
Based on the small amount of research that we have compiled here, it is obvious to anyone that investing in cybersecurity is essential. Just as you need to have an alarm system on the doors and windows, you must also guard the portals of your virtual spaces. We hope that we have given you some good advice that will help you to do that, and we also invite you to call PCH Technologies at (856) 754-7500 for more information.