It’s going to be a good year for information security markets in Asia Pacific, according to a recent IDC report that expects spending on security hardware, services, and software to reach $23.1 billion in 2021.

The rapid rise in cloud adoption, massive work from home migration, and transformation projects by enterprises to overcome operational challenges will fuel these gains, according to IDC. 

“2020 defined the importance of digital for everyone globally, but it also highlighted shortcomings in security strategies,” Simon Piff, VP of trust, security, and blockchain research at IDC Asia Pacific, wrote in the report.

The research suggests the banking, telecommunications, and federal and state governments will not only drive the growth, but will make up half of the security spending, mainly due to the fact that these industries are hotbeds for fraud, cybercrime, and breaches.

Services will be both the largest and the fastest-growing security category, accounting for 48.8% of security spending over the forecast period (2019-2024). This market segment is expected to grow at a five-year compound annual growth (CAGR) of 13.3% and reach $35 billion by 2024. Around 40% of this spending will be on managed services, followed by consulting services and integration services, according to the report

Many businesses are still struggling to address the challenges of remote work that have made IT environments inreasingly distributed and complex. This has driven enterprises to be more dependent on managed service providers (MSPs) for security.

When enterprises choose an MSP, they’re hiring a third-party vendor with on-demand access to high-level expertise in all aspects of cybersecurity to install, manage, audit, and assess their network connections. A hacked client can be catastrophic for an MSP’s reputation, so implementing strong controls is critical. 

Security hardware will be the second largest spending category after security services, according to IDC. For this reason, firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, unified threat management, and virtual private networks will be among the most sought after network security needs.

Meanwhile, Asia Pacific security software spending, driven by demand for endpoint security, and identity and digital trust software, will deliver more than half of the overall software spend in 2021, according to the firm. 

Projected hardware and software spend is in stride with employees shifting from a secure office network to their own personal access points, which have seen an increase of security threats.

In terms of scale, China alone will account for more than 40% of total Asia Pacific security spending in 2021, and the country's spending is projected to take off at a five-year CAGR of 16.8% during the forecast period.