Businesses across the world have been ravaged by the disruptive disturbances caused by the novel Coronavirus pandemic. As physical meetings and gatherings are largely prohibited due to the virulent dissemination, going virtual via digital pathways will prove to the new all-embracive norm for the year 2020. This will bode a tremendous and perhaps an irreversible impact on businesses worldwide, as the optimisation of technology is set to change the way companies think and act.
Businesses that have crossed over to the digital side are constantly jeopardized by a plethora of cybersecurity attacks from threats such as malicious software, viruses, malwares, etc. developed by sinister hackers and other cyber-criminals. These attackers can quickly invade a company's private space and steal or destroy data and assets worth millions of dollars. Therefore, building strong, robust and meticulous cybersecurity strategy and overarching cybersecurity architecture for the company is of the utmost essence under the present circumstances.
According to a report by Mordor Intelligence, the cybersecurity market stood at an impressive $161.07 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach a whopping $363.05 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 14.5% between the period 2020-25. In the light of cybersecurity events and breaches occurring at an increasingly torrential pace, the market for cybersecurity solutions is expected to rise further. According to a PWC- DSCI report, the cybersecurity segment in India too is slated to reach a value of over $3 billion by the tear 2022, while surging at a CAGR of 16%.
Even in India, the demand for cybersecurity personnel is expanding at an exponential rate as businesses brace to cope with the consistently rising number of cyberattacks. With businesses facing risk of losing valuable data assets from over 4,000 cyberattacks that occur daily, the Internet is fast turning into an ominous haunt. Unless companies allocate resources towards building state of the art cybersecurity solution architecture to thwart these imminent cyber breaches on a daily basis, businesses stand to incur phenomenally and sometimes irreversible damage.
The problem witnessed by Indian tech companies is the deficiency of optimally skilled expertise to tackle the vast surfeit of cyber threats that constantly loom in the periphery salvaging an opportunity to breach the internal systems of under-protected businesses. NASSCOM reported that India alone would need 1 million cybersecurity professionals. As per job portal Indeed, India exhibits the largest demand versus supply gap for skilled cybersecurity professionals with a 150% surge in professional postings with respect to cybersecurity job designations in the last couple of years. This is nothing short of a perilous ordeal for companies as such a want of cybersecurity skilled resources and appositely empowered cybersecurity system can be mercilessly exploited by hackers and cyber-fiends very easily.
The need for trained personnel in cyber security software solutions is extreme alongside the necessity for comprehensive cybersecurity fortifications and innovation architecture that armours assets like firewalls, anti-virus programmes, cloud data backups, restricted access to company data and scrupulously practicing a policy for in-depth monitoring and scrutiny of potential malware.
Companies also need to tap into the extensive possibilities offered by the remarkably novel tech tools like Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Machine learning to strengthen counter-threat configurations as revolutionary software innovations help provide suitable means and data required to determine the optimum solutions to the problem.
The writer is Rakesh Kharwal, MD-India, Cyberbit
