Cybersecurity spend rockets amid 'lockdown 2.0' - analyst

Market watcher Context outlines which countries have benefited the most from the security products sales spike since July

Security product sales through the channel have rocketed, due to many countries across Europe mandating that businesses return to remote working, according to the latest figures from channel analyst firm Context.

Context, which tracks sales through distribution on a weekly basis, says there has been a growth spike since the start of July, "when it became obvious to businesses that the workforce would stay at home for a longer period of time."

Broken down, Ireland and France saw the biggest four-week-rolling revenues increase since the start of July, with security product sales going up by 41 per cent and 35 per cent respectively.

Latvia, Portugal and Finland rounded off the top five with growth of 23 per cent, 21 per cent and 18 per cent for that four-week period.

Meanwhile, endpoint security revenues grew more than those from network security products.

Context business enterprise analyst Gurvan Meyer said the sales spike was a result of customers once again looking to the channel to protect fragmented and widely dispersed remote working infrastructures.

"With employees working away from the office during the COVID crisis, security challenges have increased massively," he said.

"Companies can act by protecting endpoints, and increasing sales of security products show they are doing just that... However, new challenges arise from the behaviour of a home-based workforce: for example, mixing personal and professional tasks on a corporate computer increases risks from scam emails."

Meyer added that the security channel looks set to continue to benefit from this trend.

"Ownership and responsibility for security has begun to move from the usual corporate bubble to the individual.

"With companies talking about permanently increasing the number of employees working from home, the associated challenges will create new opportunities for security vendors."