What you need to know

As digital infrastructure becomes increasingly critical to the running of government, business, charities and public services, the value of that information becomes increasingly attractive to cyber criminals, who can be highly sophisticated and in some cases funded by miscreant nations. This is driving increasingly sophisticated computer security, with the growing incorporation of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Security hardware is becoming commoditised, but the impact on the market is being offset by the growing sophistication of software and services.

The UK is widely seen as the largest computer security market in Europe and remains in dynamic growth despite flattening overall IT spend. The continued digital development, cloud computing, increased number of connected devices and the value of data held all continue to drive market growth. However, as witnessed currently with the high profile cyber-attack on Travelex, all of the technology and predictive capabilities only function if companies maintain up-to-date patches.

Covered in this Report

Computer security, also often referred to as cyber security, is the set of processes and technologies that facilitate business, commerce and consumer digital activity in a safe environment. Cyber security, however, is far from simple. The threats to computerised environments are many and various, and they are changing on a near-daily basis.

Threats to individual, corporate and government activities online come from three primary sources.

  • Criminal behaviour: attempts at committing fraud for (usually) financial gain.

  • Hacking: disrupting corporate or government activities by denial of service, defacing online content and generally damaging online reputation.

  • Espionage: gathering corporate or government information illegally to subvert competitive advantage or national security.

The number and sophistication of threats to the cyber infrastructure are increasing daily. Numerous reports cite the increasing number of security breaches, while newspapers regularly run stories of lost data files, hacked bank accounts and stolen identities.

All values quoted in this report are at current prices unless otherwise specified.

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