JEDDAH – The rising number and sophistication of cyber attacks is expanding the market for cyber security services. North American spending on managed security services (IT outsourcing focused on security services) will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 17 percent during 2013-2017, according to Gartner. The growing market and evolving threat landscape are, in turn, motivating many mergers and acquisitions. The last several years saw many large-scale acquisitions, including over 30 acquisitions of young, US-based cyber security vendors in the last 12 months alone. As enterprises and government agencies increasingly adopt cloud, mobile, and social computing, information technology (IT) environments are becoming more difficult to defend. Increasingly, organizations need to accept that security breaches are inevitable. Security strategies need to go beyond defense to include detection, response, and recovery. All this gives rise to a need for new skills and approaches and specialized tools and services, including continuous monitoring and threat forensics powered by analytics. Cyber security is increasingly becoming a concern among corporate leadership, including boards of directors. A biennial study of enterprise security governance practices by the Carnegie Mellon University CyLab found a sharp rise in board-level attention to the topic. Among companies surveyed in 2012, 48 percent have a board-level risk committee responsible for privacy and security, up from just 8 percent in 2008. The evolving nature of cyber threats calls for a collaborative and networked defense. Collective intelligence refers to the sharing of information about vulnerabilities, threats, and remedies between enterprises and government and between enterprises and security vendors. – SG
