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Mar. 23 (NBD) -- CCID Consulting Co., Ltd. ("CCID Consulting"), a China-based research, consulting and IT outsourcing service company, predicted China's cybersecurity market will continue a steady growth momentum over the next three years, expected to reach 73.89 billion yuan (11.7 billion U.S. dollars) by 2020, with an annual compound growth rate of 21.7 percent, said a senior analyst of the consultancy's Software & Information Service Industry Research Center. 

The cybersecurity industry has seen substantial growth following last year's damaging WannaCry ransomware attack as well as the release of The Cybersecurity Law and supporting policies and regulations.  

Last year, the niche sector witnessed a string of financing deals as well as mergers and acquisitions (M&As), including the biggest-ever security acquisition deal - chip giant Intel's purchase of Israeli automotive technology company Mobileye for a whopping 15.3 billion U.S. dollars, according to the 2018 report on the development of network information security released by CCID Consulting Thursday. 

The report showed that the financing amount of Chinese security startups totaled 3.5 billion yuan (553.2 million U.S. dollars) in 2017, several times the size of previous years. Of them, 18 percent was raised by cloud security firms. 

Cloud security products have experienced an obvious surge in demand since 2016, said Zhou Tao, assistant president of China's leading network security company Venustech. 

Data showed that the Chinese cloud security market registered a 42.2 percent surge in 2016 following a 30.6 percent rise in 2015. In 2017, it grew further with a 30.2 percent increase from the 2016 level to a size of 2.37 billion yuan (374.6 million U.S. dollars).

A number of listed companies, accordingly, rode the wave of growth.

Venustech Group Inc. generated profits of around 466 million yuan (73.7 million U.S. dollars), up 56.23 percent from a year ago thanks to the increase of new orders. Beijing VRV Software Corporation Limited, which principally engages in the R&D, manufacture and sales of information security software, reaped profits of about 104 million yuan (16.3 million U.S. dollars), representing a year-over-year increase of 20.02 percent. 

Currently, IT giants are speeding up the arrangements to tap into the security areas, including automotive security, application security, machine learning, threat intelligence, and security analysis. 

E-commerce giant Amazon's cloud services group, for instance, has acquired San Diego-based AI security startup harvest.ai, which enables organizations to identify and stop data breaches, insider threats, and stolen credentials. Software titan Microsoft has bought Hexadite, a company delivering agentless, automatic incident investigation and remediation solutions.

The development of the cloud security market has promoted the transformation of China's network information security industry. 

The network security service sector is projected to embrace fast growth, with the market size estimated to hit 12.36 billion yuan (2.0 billion U.S. dollars) by 2020.  

Email: lansuying@nbd.com.cn