Cybersecurity Services: Shifting from Horizontal to Industry Vertical-Specific Approach

As cyber threats rise, organizations continue to secure their hybrid environments by refreshing, enabling, and standardizing security controls deployment to address trends emerging around cloudification, Industry 4.0, the convergence of 5G, and software-defined networking. This has fundamentally shifted how cybersecurity services are viewed from a general-use horizontal solution to industry vertical-specific offerings.

Both demand-side and supply-side trends are covered in our Cybersecurity Services 2023 Market Insights™ and Cybersecurity Services 2023 RadarView™ , respectively. These reports present a comprehensive study of cybersecurity service providers and closely examine market leaders, innovators, disruptors, and challengers.

Avasant evaluated 42 service providers across three dimensions: practice maturity, partner ecosystem, and investments and innovation. Of the 42 providers, we recognized 30 that brought the most value to the market during the past 12 months.

The report recognizes service providers in four categories:

• • Leaders: Accenture, Atos, HCLTech, IBM, Infosys, Orange Cyberdefense, TCS, Telefónica Tech, and Wipro
  • Innovators: AT&T Cybersecurity, British Telecom, Capgemini, Cognizant, DXC, Kyndryl, LTIMindtree, NTT, Secureworks, and Tech Mahindra
  • Disruptors: Fujitsu, Lumen, Mphasis, Trustwave, UST, Verizon, and Zensar
  • Challengers: Alert Logic, Persistent Systems, Sequretek, and Unisys

Figure 1 below from the full report illustrates these categories:

“The utilization of cloud services and SaaS platforms by borderless enterprises have significantly altered the traditional security boundaries,” said Gaurav Dewan, Avasant research director. “This necessitates regular evaluations to identify and address any vulnerabilities to maintain compliance.”

The reports provide several findings, including the following:

• • Around 40% of cybersecurity services traction comes from banking, healthcare and life sciences, and manufacturing. These industries invest in cyber resilience using the zero-trust IAM approach and deploying security orchestration and automation runbooks and playbooks for proactive threat detection and remediation.
  • Though project-based pricing continues to be the preferred model with more than 50% of engagements, the as-a-service model has seen a huge uptake. Given the scale of uncertainty and complexity of projects, there is a shift from a single-pricing model to a hybrid service-oriented pricing model.
  • Though the cybersecurity workforce has grown 30% YOY, there is still a global skill shortage of nearly 3 million workers. There is also a high demand for threat detection compared to monitoring, which requires professionals with a hunter background who can help analyze customer application environments for malicious activity.
  • Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT are being tested to navigate alerts, create an automated response, and assign tasks based on incident type. Likewise, there are efforts to establish quantum-secure communications using quantum key distribution.

“As the threat landscape continues to evolve, there will be a growing dependence on service providers to fulfill specialized cybersecurity requirements,” said Avasant Senior Director Mark Gaffney. “This will involve utilizing advanced AI technologies to enhance threat intelligence, vulnerability management, and IDAM capabilities.”

The RadarView also features detailed profiles of 30 service providers, along with their solutions, offerings, and experience in assisting enterprises in their cybersecurity journeys.

This Research Byte is a brief overview of the Cybersecurity Services 2023 Market Insights™ and Cybersecurity Services 2023 RadarView^™. (click for pricing).