3 min read What do investors see as the COVID-19 Impact on the Cybersecurity Space?
The fact that COVID has impacted nearly every aspect of our daily lives is not new information. The way we live, connect, work, and play has been directly impacted.
As our lives moved online, the web evolved and adapted to our increasing dependence on it. This led to increased vulnerabilities and therefore increased attacks on personal and corporate information.
The cybersecurity sector has been adapting to keep up. In doing so, players in the space have gained new insight on more efficient ways to move forward.
COVID-19 Impact
During the last year of lockdown, working from home has left the workforce more vulnerable to malicious attacks and created specific challenges in the cybersecurity space.
Employees are using their own devices to log into networks, exposing themselves and their personal information more now than ever. Corporate IP is suddenly at risk of invasion, and as a result, there’s new funding, and therefore solutions, aimed at those particular issues.
People have become increasingly comfortable working remotely, putting a huge amount of pressure on the IT environment to decentralize.
At the same time, in America alone, 300,000 jobs in cybersecurity are currently unfilled. There aren’t enough skilled workers to fill the industry’s current needs.
In the next 12 months to 18 months, we will likely see a boom in the space as people recognize this trend, take the time to get the required education, and fill the need.
We’ll start seeing more opportunities for the cybersecurity space. We will likely see many of the technologies that depended on the old environment struggle to keep up in the new remote world, leading to consolidation within the industry.
Privacy Needs
We’re seeing a trend around privacy in cyberspace as people now recognize their data is being used (and misused) overall, and they’re not getting compensated for it. At the same time, the amount of information leaks is increasing exponentially, leading to corporations and individuals demanding better privacy protection.
Ten years ago, everything was centralized; employees were in offices and accessing the corporate network through a VPN.
COVID flipped this scenario on its head, and now people are not only working remotely but from a variety of places, each with their own unique internet connections.
They’re using personal devices, not always their own, that have systems that might be calling out to nefarious servers. The exposure to the opportunity for hackers to take advantage is now rampant, and the understanding of the corporate environment is more confused than ever as they’ve lost some control and understanding of their own systems.
Back to Basics
The cybersecurity space has experienced a resurgence of “back to the basics”. The industry has been around for about twenty years, but there has been a massive explosion in investment, major acquisitions, and new companies in the last five years.
One of the patterns presenting itself in all of this is that we’re going back to a lot of the basics that a good security program is built on.
Questions like “Before I think about securing my stuff, where is all of my stuff?” and “What are all the accounts that we have?” or “Where are all of our servers? Our data centers? Our users?” are now back at the forefront.
Due to this reverted mindset, more companies focus on fundamentals such as asset management and attack surface, leading to specialization.
We’re starting to see more security companies avoiding solving all of the issues, instead simply wanting to make the user more efficient at X or to increase efficiency in generating returns to the user rather than completely claiming to protect the customer from the user cataclysmic breach.
Read more in the TEN Capital eGuide: https://www.startupfundingespresso.com/investor-perspectives-on-the-cybersecurity/.
Hall T. Martin is the founder and CEO of the TEN Capital Network. TEN Capital has been connecting startups with investors for over ten years. You can connect with Hall about fundraising, business growth, and emerging technologies via LinkedIn or email: hallmartin@tencapital.group
