Gary Harmer, Sales Director, Hikvision UK, says that end users always are interested in cyber security and Thomas Lausten, CEO of Mobotix, says: “I think they are even more interested than we as a business and as a market actually realise. We are talking to many big end users, and their focus on cyber security is first of all that this is mandatory”, he says.

Aaron Chao, Marketing Director at Uniview’s International Business Department, stresses that the end users have begun to realise the importance of privacy, control and protection. He also believes GDPR is a departure point for many end customers in terms of taking cyber security seriously.

Malou Mousten Dyhr Toft, VP for EMEA, Milestone Systems, believes that end customers are sometimes not necessarily aware of the cyber security threat before it hits them. Therefore, she thinks the industry has an educational responsibility to increase the awareness. She says: “I think we have a role to play where we are being proactive in terms of informing and teaching the end users how they are going to handle the data that they have retrieved and they have stored, so that they get a helping hand – a trusted adviser – to help them sort through this jungle.”

Genetec CEO Pierre Racz says larger customers are certainly more interested in cyber security than smaller customers because, for example, the penalties for GDPR violations are quite severe. However, he also has some warnings.

“There are a lot of people trying to pretend that they are trustworthy, and it is not just because you have a certification, it is not just because you can hire some high cost security expert to say that your system is secure, your system might not be obviously insecure, but the company might just not be trustworthy”, he says.