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The airport sector is forecast to be the fastest growing critical infrastructure market area for cyber security investment on a global scale, reaching US$1.87 billion by 2030.
This is according to analyst firm Frost & Sullivan, which claimed that the sector's growth, a 10-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.1 per cent, is due to the construction of new airports, as well as updating the systems of existing ones.
"This is driven by the ongoing construction of new facilities, significant digitalisation upgrades within existing airports and the incremental updates being made to cyber security systems to keep up with the changing cyber-threat landscape and improve detection capabilities," said Danielle VanZandt, industry analyst for security at Frost & Sullivan.
The boom within airport cyber security invest comes amid the forecast for the whole global critical infrastructure cyber security market to reach US$24.22 billion by 2030, roughly a 12 per cent increase from US$21.68 billion in 2020.
The Asia Pacific market is also expected to be the second-fastest growing region for the sector, beaten only by Africa. In both regions, investment is mostly predicted to support the construction, renovation and expansion of facilities, as well as changing consumer awareness of cyber security risks.
Meanwhile, the Middle East is anticipated to remain the region with the largest cyber security spend.
For those looking to make the most of the critical infrastructure cyber security market, Frost & Sullivan recommended that solutions need to be able to identify as much data as possible.
In particular, the firm suggested that monitoring solutions need to be able to detect the actions of active and passive sets, as well as all data types, and then be able to analyse the data.
For network topology capabilities, products and services need to be able to identify and discover IT, internet of things (IoT) and operational technology (OT) within any given network to flesh out topological models.
Automation should also be a top priority, like continuous monitoring and automatic discovery tasks, as well as automatic and predictive capabilities. The firm noted the latter feature shows to customers how systems will not overwhelm existing security functions.
Meanwhile, market players looking to update older OT assets and devices are recommended to look at components that were not engineered by secure-by-design manufacturing.
