Annual output from the nation’s information security industry is forecast to rise by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.9 percent from 2017 to 2021, as cyberattacks increase in frequency globally, the Industrial Economics and Knowledge Center (IEK, 產業經濟與趨勢研究中心) said yesterday.
“Global demand last year helped drive sales of Taiwan’s information security hardware products, while domestic demand boosted the system integration and consulting businesses,” IEK research manager Hsu Fu-kuei (徐富桂) told a forum in Taipei.
IEK is an organization under the government-funded Industrial Technology Research Institute (工研院).
Annual output is expected to grow 9.31 percent to NT$47.8 billion (US$1.54 billion) this year, from NT$43.73 billion last year, Hsu said.
“The fastest growth will come from information security services, such as inspection and management,” Hsu said, adding that the business is expected to have a CAGR of 15.9 percent from 2017 to 2021.
Information security services would account for 35.32 percent of the industry’s total output in 2021, while hardware products, such as Internet security platforms, identity identification modules for terminal and mobile devices, would make up 47.9 percent, he said.
There is a growing awareness of information security among local manufacturers, especially after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) lost NT$5.2 billion last year when its production lines were attacked by a computer virus, constituting the biggest information security crisis Taiwan has seen, Hsu said.
IP cameras, smart doorbells, webcams and more than 1 million other devices have been attacked or utilized by hackers with access to the Internet of Things network worldwide in the past few years, he said.
“Where there is an information security crisis, there is also commercial opportunity,” Hsu said.
Some Taiwanese companies have been investing in physically unclonable function technology in the semiconductor production process, while others have been developing encoded software to avoid piracy, he said.
“Devices, connections and cloud storage face information security challenges, as they are all connected,” Hsu said.
In light of the approaching 5G era, the biggest security challenge is to create well-rounded security networks based on the context of the product, as each will face its own threats, such as subscriber information leaks through insiders or attacks on cloud storage, Telecom Technology Center deputy CEO Lin Hsuan-yu (林炫佑) said.
“Companies should regard strong information security as a feature of their products and package it as a selling point when facing consumers,” Lin said.
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