OT systems of CI a lucrative market for cybersecurity

Cybersecurity vendors seeking to tap the anticipated demand from critical infrastructure (CI) operators must ensure that their data traffic monitoring solutions for operational technology (OT) systems can detect the actions of active and passive assets and all data traffic types, then decide how best to analyse the data.

This is one of the major pieces of advice given by Frost & Sullivan in its latest analysis of the global critical infrastructure cybersecurity market. Segmented into oil and gas facilities, utilities (electric and water), maritime (ports and entry points), and airports, the research firm estimates the market will reach US$24.22 billion by 2030 from US$21.68 billion in 2020.

Despite the ever-increasing threat landscape and their incredibly high-risk profile, the Frost & Sullivan study pointed out that critical infrastructure organisations 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.

“While oil and gas facilities will continue to remain, the largest segment investing in cybersecurity solutions, airports will prove to be the fastest-growing one, with a CAGR of 10.1%. Spending is expected to reach US$1.87 billion by 2030,” said Danielle VanZandt, industry analyst for security at Frost & Sullivan.

“This is driven by the ongoing construction of new facilities, significant digitalization upgrades within existing airports, and the incremental updates being made to cybersecurity systems to keep up with the changing cyber-threat landscape and improve detection capabilities,” she added.

Besides ensuring that their data traffic monitoring for OT systems are up to scratch, the Frost & Sullivan analysis said cybersecurity vendors should focus on the following in order to tap into a potentially lucrative market:

• 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 organisational 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.