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Airports to become fastest-growing infrastructure sector to invest in Cybersecurity


May 31, 2021  By Wings Staff

Frost & Sullivan in late May published a report looking at the growth of cybersecurity in what it categorizes as critical infrastructure facilities, which is expected to invest up to US$24.22 billion by 2020 (all dollar amounts in U.S. figures).

In the report, called Digitalization and Real-time Visibility Transforming the Global Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity Market, critical infrastructure is then segmented into oil and gas facilities, utilities (electric and water), maritime (ports and entry points), and airports.

“While oil and gas facilities will continue to remain the largest [critical infrastructure] segment investing in cybersecurity solutions, airports will prove to be the fastest-growing one, with a CAGR of 10.1 per cent. Spending is expected to reach $1.87 billion by 2030,” said Danielle VanZandt, Industry Analyst for Security at Frost & Sullivan.

VanZandt continued to explain the growth in cybersecurity investment by airports is being driven by the construction of new facilities, digitalization upgrades within existing airports, and incremental updates being made to cybersecurity systems to keep up and to also improve detection capabilities.

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In announcing its new report, Frost & Sullivan notes, that while corporate and consumer businesses remain popular marks for cyberattacks, critical infrastructure facilities have become increasingly viable threat targets.

“Africa is expected to be the fastest-growing region, followed closely by Asia-Pacific,” said VanZandt about integrating cybersecurity into airport. “Much of the investment in both regions is from new facilities being built, renovated, or expanded that require new cybersecurity systems installed, as well as changing consumer awareness of their cybersecurity risks. The Middle East will remain the largest market and will continue to fortify its cyber defenses and protect against prevalent cyber-threats.”

Frost & Sullivan notes, despite holding an “incredibly high-risk profile”, critical infrastructure organizations remain far behind where they should be in their cyber maturity and digital resilience strategies, necessitating a rapid push to fortify cyber defenses and manage their cyber-risk profiles.

The global critical infrastructure cybersecurity market, based on all of the segments described above, is estimated to reach $24.22 billion by 2030 from $21.68 billion in 2020. The new Frost & Sullivan study includes growth drivers, customer priorities, and spending forecasts across verticals and regions.

The research group points to the following areas to focus on in terms of finding lucrative growth prospects with cybersecurity and critical infrastructure:

• Data traffic monitoring for operational technology systems – “Vendors must ensure that their monitoring solutions can detect the actions of active and passive assets and all data traffic types, then decide how best to analyze the data.”

• Network topology solutions for vulnerability and risk assessment – “Market participants seeking to provide network topology capabilities need to ensure that they can identify and discover the variety of information technology (IT), Internet of Things (IoT), and operational technology (OT) devices within an organization’s network architecture to begin building the topological model.”

• Continuous discovery for organizational assets – “For security vendors, emphasizing continuous monitoring and automatic discovery tasks will help attract new customers and improve their market share.”

• Predictive analytics and threat intelligence for incident detection – “Cybersecurity solutions providers must emphasize automatic and predictive capabilities in their system tests and proofs of concept with customers to show how these systems will not overwhelm their existing security functions.”

• Secure-by-design initiatives for operational technology assets and systems – “Security operators that want to update older OT assets and devices should look at any components that are not engineered via secure-by-design manufacturing.”

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