The rapid adoption of the cloud has led to growth in the enterprise information security and risk management end-user spending in India which is expected to rise 9.5 per cent annually to total of $2.08 billion in 2021, according to the latest forecast from research firm Gartner.

“The overnight move to remote-working in reaction to the pandemic exposed organizations’ vulnerabilities” said Prateek Bhajanka, senior principal research analyst at Gartner. “While security leaders had to cut down on their security spending in 2020 because of IT budget cuts, in 2021, this trend is reversing. A secure digital environment is now foundational to organizations’ growth and in preparation to another crisis that may arise. Security leaders are ready to reinvest in cybersecurity with a renewed and refreshed rigor.”

In 2021, organizations are expected to increase their spending across all segments of security and risk management, analysts said at the ongoing Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit India, which began virtually on Wednesday. In continuation of the trend from last year, Gartner forecasts that cloud security and integrated risk management will experience the highest growth in 2021, up 251 per cent and 27.8 per cent respectively.

“India is at an early stage of cloud adoption and the pandemic only accelerated this shift as organizations moved to the cloud to achieve cost efficiency and business continuity,” said Bhajanka. “In 2020, hyperscalers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud increased their investment in data centres in India, further catalyzing Indian organizations’ move to cloud during the pandemic.”