Demand for MSS continued to quickly increase among ASEAN countries as the market grew significantly by 18.6%, on a YoY basis. Though investment in security measures for better security protection and risk management continued to increase, organizations in ASEAN faced growing challenges in security operations due to shortage of professionals and domain expertise, which eventually left them vulnerable to data breaches and other security threats.

The recent data breaches of more than 46 million mobile users’ personal information in October 2017, and the data breach of SingHealth were typical examples of threats that organizations faced, which may have been a result of the shortage of security professionals.

The market was dominated by Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, in which Singapore contributed to more than 60% of the overall ASEAN market revenue. There are several factors that drive the strong adoption of MSS in Singapore, of which higher awareness of cybersecurity, stronger MSS ecosystem, stronger demand for advanced threat management, stricter requirements for compliance, and cost management were the key driving forces.

Malaysia remained the second largest MSS adopter in 2017, making up 12.4% of the ASEAN market share. Businesses in Malaysia tend to stick to basic MSS services. The drop in market growth over the last 1 to 2 years was mainly due to the insourcing trend among banks and large insurance companies, the largest adopters of MSS in the country.

BFSI and government verticals remained the top two spenders of MSS in 2017. Increasing adoption of MSS was also observed in other verticals, such as manufacturing, education, and others.

Monitoring/management services remained the largest revenue contributors to the market, generating more than 75% of the overall market value as businesses in ASEAN continued to prefer traditional MSS, be it system health check, security asset monitoring/management, compliance and other perimeter security monitoring/management services. The segment continued its significant growth momentum.

Moving forward, the MMS segment is set to maintain its strong growth momentum, from 2017 to 2022 and remain the largest revenue contributor.

Author: Divya Prasad