The major government initiatives include the National Cyber Security Strategy (2014-2018) combined with Q-CERT and several other such types of ministries that are responsible for providing security to critical infrastructural facilities.

However, the spread of Covid-19 led to an overall economic slowdown across the country as a result of a fall in oil prices, which further declined the government revenues and had an adverse impact on the ongoing investment sizes and activities in domains such as BFSI, energy and telecommunication, thereby leading to falling demand for managed security services during the year 2020.

Despite the slowdown in 2020, analysts anticipate that market revenues should recover from 2021 onwards owing to the resumption of economic activities, business, trade and industry due to the upcoming FIFA world cup 2022 along with Qatar Vision 2023, which in turn would re-start the flow of funds in ICT & IT markets and thus propel the growth of managed security service market in near future.

Growing dependence on the ICT sector for creating a knowledge-based economy by the Qatar government so as to align with Qatar Vision 2030 coupled with rising internet users would escalate the digital footprint across the country, thus, fostering the demand for managed security services in the forthcoming years.

Based on deployment, on-premise managed security services is projected to generate the highest revenues in the overall Qatar managed security services market on account of maximum availability of control and visibility to the in-house IT team over the organisation’s internal infrastructure. Thus, actively protecting sensitive data, applications and network from rising threats and attacks in cyber space. However, with the growing adoption of the work from home norm among employees and increasing application of IoT, big data, artificial intelligence and other such types of advanced & emerging technologies, cloud-based managed security services should witness considerable growth in the coming years, predicts the research company.

According to Alpana Tyagi, Senior Research Analyst, 6wresearch, “Security assets monitoring and management services have played a pivotal role in monitoring the devices, software and data assets of an institution to protect them from breakdowns, theft and unauthorised access as a result, the aforementioned segment held a majority share in Qatar managed security services market revenues in 2020, underpinned by the increased hardware and software dependency of the several institutions including banks, IT, hospitals and government in the recent years.

Security assets monitoring & management services would retain its dominancy in the forecast period on account of the rising usage of IT services and increasing data dependency of the various sectors,” Alpana further added.

According to Apoorva Sawhney, Senior Research Analyst, 6wresearch, ”Large enterprises are contributing a major share to Qatar managed security services market on account of the increasing number of large commercial offices in varied locations that maintain

their operations digitally and have a large number of databases to safeguard. The high revenue generation associated with large enterprises also supports their expenditure on MSSPs.

In the coming years, large enterprises are expected to lead the market owing to the rising number of multinational companies being established in Qatar and the rising risk of cyber attacks,” Apoorva further added.

According to Rahul Dubey, Research Associate, 6wresearch, “Small and medium institutions are still reluctant to share their sensitive data over the cloud which makes the on-premise managed security services contribute the major share to the Qatar managed security services market. Moreover, Lack of knowledge about the cloud and higher belief in on-premise security services has backed the on-premise managed security services in holding the major share in Qatar managed security services market. However, Cloud managed security services would witness higher growth in the forecast period because of the low investment and human resource requirement.”