Enterprise information security spending in India to grow 12pc to $1.86B in 2019: Gartner

Enterprise information security spending in India is on pace to total $1.86 billion in 2019, an increase of 12.4 percent from the previous year, research firm Gartner said on Monday.

The spending, which stood at $1.66 billion in 2018, is further estimated to rise to $2.1 billion by 2020, Gartner said in a statement.

The growth of enterprise spending on information security in India will continue to grow unabated to reach over $2 billion in 2020, said Gartner Principal Research Analyst Prateek Bhajanka.

"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," he added.

In addition, the rise in advanced cyber attacks, ransomware and malware attacks has put cybersecurity as a top investment priority for Indian chief information security officers (CISOs), therefore increasing spending on security locally, he said.

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Security services is expected to attract the most spending from CISOs and security leaders in 2019 as local organisations are emphasising on threat detection, compliance and security hygiene. In 2019, security services will represent 51.5 percent ($963 million) of the total enterprise information security spending in India.

Enterprise spending on cloud security is expected to total $4 million in 2019, an increase of 300 percent from 2018, Gartner said.

"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," Gartner Principal Research Analyst Rustam Malik said.

In addition, Indian organisations 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 fuelling the triple-digit growth of cloud security in India, he added.

In 2019, integrated risk management solutions will be the second-fastest growing segment, achieving a 23.1 percent increase year-on-year.

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, Gartner said.

Local regulatory bodies have mandated Indian organisations to store critical data in local data centres to ensure better monitoring of data, confidentiality and data security, it added.

In addition, Indian CISOs are also concerned about compliance issues that will arise with the implementation of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it said.

In 2020, cloud security, integrated risk management and data security will continue to be the highest-growing segments among local businesses, Gartner said.

CISOs need to focus on developing a data security governance framework that will help mitigate the risks caused by security threats, data residency and privacy issues, Malik said.

"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," he said.

(Edited by Evelyn Ratnakumar)

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