CISOs Ready to Reinvest in Cybersecurity With Renewed Vigor: Gartner Analyst

A secure digital environment is foundational to organizations’ growth and can help prepare for another crisis that may arise. While security leaders had to cut-down on their security spending in 2020 because of IT budget-cuts, in 2021, this trend is reversing. This is according to analysts at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit that took place this week virtually in India.

Gartner also forecasts that enterprise information security and risk management end user spending in India is on pace to total US$2.08 billion in 2021, an increase of 9.5% from 2020.

“The overnight move to remote-working in reaction to the pandemic exposed organizations’ vulnerabilities,” Prateek Bhajanka, senior principal research analyst at Gartner said at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit India on Thursday.

“CISOs are ready to reinvest in cybersecurity with a renewed and refreshed vigor,” he said.

Cloud security continues to rule

In 2021, organizations are expected to increase their spending across all segments of security and risk management. Continuing the trend from last year, cloud security and integrated risk management will experience the highest growth in 2021, up 251% and 27.8%, respectively.

“India is at an early stage of cloud adoption and the pandemic only accelerated this shift as organizations moved to the cloud to achieve cost efficiency and business continuity,” said Bhajanka.

According to him, in 2020, hyperscalers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, increased their investment in data centers in India, further catalyzing Indian organizations’ move to cloud during the pandemic.”

CISOs and security leaders are aware of the risks and vulnerabilities that their organizations can be exposed to while migrating to cloud from legacy systems. To manage these risks, organizations are increasing their spending on cloud security tools, driving the market up 251.1% in 2021.

Gartner also sees Cloud access security brokers (CASB) and cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) will be some of the major technologies that CISOs in India will increase their spending on within the cloud security segment in 2021.

In addition, Indian CISOs and security leaders will focus on establishing and deploying threat detection and response programs and capabilities, such as endpoint detection and response (EDR), and move to cloud delivered security capabilities to have consistent security coverage whether working from office, home or off-site.

Privacy and instilling digital trust

At the summit analysts also discussed how organizations must keep up with the dynamic and increasing legal obligations governing privacy and data security, understand how they apply, monitor risks and attack trends, and manage their compliance to minimize exposure.

Nader Henein, Research Vice President at Gartner, said that privacy cannot be a one-off project but rather an ongoing program that is just getting started.

COVID-19 highlighted the maturity of the framework established by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This has made a noticeable difference to global privacy.

While it is important for organizations to start the privacy discovery process manually to get a feel for the complexity within their data, it becomes quickly evident that there is a need for automation to deliver scale, believes Henein, adding that one key success factor for a privacy program is the partnerships built with other organizational teams. Connect with your chief data officer (CDO) to understand what data is being used and how you can support them with privacy-preserving alternatives.

“Privacy is deeply personal, according to Henein. “As you gain control over the data you process and turn it back over to consumers, compliance is no longer just a goal. It becomes part of the ethical fabric of your business.

The pressure to transform has increased during the pandemic and trust is central in doing so: Through 2023, organizations that can instill digital trust will be able to participate in 50% more ecosystems to expand revenue-generating opportunities.