The increasing prevalence and sophistication of attacks on enterprise social media platforms is driving a boom in the social media security market, new research has found.
According to a report published by research company MarketsandMarkets, the social media security market is forecast to grow from $895.6m in 2018 to $1.97bn by 2023, at a CAGR of 17.1%.
The surge can be attributed to an increase in cyber-attacks globally as well as the growing pressures of regulatory compliance in the industry.
North America and the Asia-Pacific region account for the largest market share and fastest rate of growth respectively. Both regions have enormous rates of social media penetration, with Asia-Pacific in particular displaying a marked uptick in the rates of social media being used as a means of conducting business. It is predicted that by 2023 it will overtake North America as the largest market for social media security globally.
In terms of industry sectors, manufacturing shows the fastest rate of uptake in security solutions, as social media is used widely for promotion, customer experience management and marketing. Banking, financial services and insurance organizations are also investing heavily in the technology.
Employee risk
The report also reveals that among the contributing factors to the growing need for social media security solutions is a rise in employees using their social media accounts at work, thus exposing their companies to greater risk of malicious attack. This can be exacerbated by practices such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives.
The research found that SMEs are particularly vulnerable to internal and external data breaches, since larger organizations often have more stringent security measures in place and tend to be early adopters of new security technology.
Among the services offered by social media security solutions are monitoring – which is predicted to be the biggest driver of market growth; threat intelligence; and risk management.
Potential obstacles to the sector’s growth include constraints around data privacy, a lack of cross-border regulation and the fact that social media servers transmit data across boundaries and jurisdictions.