The cybersecurity industry has been one of the big winners of the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only has distributed working led to new threats and data regulators flexed their muscles to drive cybersecurity up the board agenda, but the rapid acceleration of digitisation across all industries has meant that businesses have had to consider cybersecurity in the context of new systems and processes. All of this has led to frenetic activity in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and investment markets as the smart money seeks to spot the winners in an increasingly crowded market. We expect to see more of this in 2021.

During the early weeks of the pandemic, businesses drastically shifted from on-site to remote-working environments, while putting the importance of connectivity first to meet the needs of customers and the business. The daily and constant reliance by business on remote-working solutions has brought new cybersecurity challenges, and, unfortunately opportunities for cyber criminals. While the security of video-calling platforms such as Zoom has attracted much interest, it is the back-end systems that tend to be the focus of the cybersecurity professionals. Remote-working solutions sit within a tech stack that all needs to work together and fit within an appropriate set of technical and organisational measures that strike a balance between employee productivity and ensuring confidentiality, privacy and availability of the company's systems and proprietary information. In creating new or modifying existing business processes and customer experience, such as mobility services or cloud services, digitalisation also means increased connectivity. And with increased connectively comes increased cyber risk, as it is ultimately the internet that provides cyber criminals with a pathway into vulnerable businesses. The need for secure remote-working environments also involves continuous adaptation of security standards and solutions, which provides opportunities not just companies providing cybersecurity solutions but also for those setting standards and implementing them.