COVID19's impact on IT spending (in 2020) and the future of cybersecurity

International Monetary Fund recently released its World Economic Outlook report for 2020. As per the report, the global growth in 2020 is expected to fall to -3% (a downgrade of 6.3% points from January 2020) making the COVID19 recession the worst since the Great depression and making global financial crisis (2009) look like a baby.

With such economic crisis looming and uncertainty about how future looks, it is a herculean task for any CIO to do budgeting for 2020. Let’s take a look at some of the information from survey (till 30th Mar, 2020) done by ETR with over 1300+ CIOs and IT Executives. Here are the key takeaways:

• Around 35% are not planning on reducing their IT spend
• ~20% are planning to increase IT spend
• ~28% respondents plan to reduce their IT spend by more than 10%

If you analyze sentiments better, it is the Work from Home infrastructure (collaboration tools, VPNs, mobiles/laptops), security software and cloud data centers that are expected to drive the spend in 2020. In the nutshell, we will see restructuring of the IT budget and before mentioned areas will see an increase in their pie. Here is the full analysis by Dave Vellante @theCUBE.

Post-COVID19 world is expected to observe Cybersecurity as one of the top priorities for enterprises. The current situation has posed a threat for enterprises to maintain business continuity and security. Incase you are interested to know more on this, here is my last article on surge in cyberattacks during this pandamic.

As per McKinsey, new tactics can help cybersecurity leaders to safeguard their organization. Read full article to know more about suggestions from McKinsey.

Although next few months may see tactical handling of the situation but in long term cybersecurity is bound to become a part of overall organizational strategy. This may see organizations’ perception of cybersecurity changing from merely being a cost-center to being a business enabler.

The new era will see the rise of CISOs. More and more companies will start having CISO as part of their executive team. Information security and privacy compliance are going to take the center stage. This shake down is also a great opportunity for startups and more innovation to prosper.

The global cybersecurity market is currently worth $173B in 2020 and poised to grow to $270B by 2026. Forbes has nicely published various forecasts on expected growth of Cybersecurity – 2020 Roundup of Cybersecurity Forecasts and Market Estimates. Also, here is an interview of Hank Thomas (Cofounder and CEO - Strategic Cyber Ventures) where he is bullish about cybersecurity and mentions about his eagerness to see product innovation in data security as well as lateral movement detection (and protection).