Mumbai:

Enterprise information security and risk management spending in India is likely to increase by 9.5 per cent this year to 2.08 billion dollars (about Rs 15,076 crore), according to Gartner Inc.

"The overnight move to remote-working in reaction to pandemic exposed organisations' vulnerabilities while security leaders had to cut down on their security spending in 2020 because of IT budget cuts. In 2021, this trend is reversing," said Prateek Bhajanka, Senior Principal Research Analyst at Gartner.

"A secure digital environment is now foundational to organisations' growth and in preparation for another crisis that may arise. Security leaders are ready to reinvest in cybersecurity with a renewed and refreshed rigour."

Gartner analysts shared how security and risk management leaders (CISOs) can advance their IT cybersecurity and risk strategy at the Gartner security and risk management summit in India taking place virtually on Thursday.

In 2021, organisations are expected to increase their spending across all segments of security and risk management. A continuing trend from last year, cloud security and integrated risk management will experience the highest growth in 2021, up by 251 per cent and 27.8 per cent respectively.

"India is at an early stage of cloud adoption and pandemic only accelerated this shift as organisations moved to the cloud to achieve cost efficiency and business continuity," said Bhajanka.

"In 2020, hyper scalers such as Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure and Google cloud increased their investment in data centres in India, further catalysing Indian organisations' move to cloud during the pandemic," he added.

Indian CISOs and security leaders will focus on establishing and deploying threat detection and response programs and capabilities such as endpoint detection and response and move to cloud-delivered security capabilities to have consistent security coverage whether working from office, home or off-site.

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