Revenue of InfoWatch in 2022 rose by 16%

In 2022, the revenue of the information security (IS) solution developer InfoWatch grew by 16%, amounting to 2.2 billion rubles. Natalya Kasperskaya, president of the InfoWatch group of companies, spoke about this in an interview with Vedomosti. She did not disclose earnings data.

According to SPARK-Interfax, in 2021, InfoWatch’s revenue was 1.9 billion rubles, profit – 116 million rubles.

According to Kaspersky, the forecast for revenue was “a little more”, but last year there were no “special failures and changes, unlike the covid year.” “Many companies claim that they have wild growth due to import substitution, and in our segment, fortunately or unfortunately, everything was replaced 5 years ago, and we have DLP on the market (Data Leak Prevention – specialized software for protecting against leaks data) there are almost no foreign players left,” she explained.

InfoWatch is not the only provider of information security solutions that increased revenue in 2022. At the end of January 2023, representatives of BI.Zone, Qrator Labs, Group-IB also spoke to Vedomosti about the growth of annual indicators by 1.5-2 times, ” Security Code”, UserGate and “Multifactor”.

The revenue of domestic vendors will continue to grow, because not all solutions that were previously supplied by foreign players are easy to replace, says Pavel Korostelev, head of the Security Code company’s product promotion department. At the moment, the level of penetration of domestic means of protection in the private sector is about 40%, in the public sector – 70%, the expert estimated.

As for the prospects of the Russian information security market, now there is rather a shortage of quality offers, Dmitry Kurashev, director of UserGate, notes. “Everyone understands that Russian customers are faced with a natural and objective need to switch to domestic solutions. Therefore, it is also natural that many Russian information security developers directed their resources and efforts to eliminate the deficit,” he said.

In 2023, InfoWatch will focus on the development of two new areas – APCS protection systems (Automated Process Control System – Vedomosti comment) and firewalls (firewalls) for the corporate sector, Kaspersky specified. “Until recently, this segment of the market did not develop well because ICS manufacturers claimed to have built-in security,” she explained. “However, most of the ICS were from unfriendly countries, and last year it became clear to everyone that built-in protection was not enough.” The market demand for firewalls is also associated with the abrupt exit of foreign security screen manufacturers such as CiscoFortinet and others, Kaspersky added.

The main consumers of solutions for the protection of automated process control systems are companies operating in industry, energy and transport, listed the head of the group for the provision of services in the field of cybersecurity Kept Ilya Shalenkov. These companies use industrial control systems to manage production processes and infrastructure that can be critical to their business and to society as a whole, he said. As for firewalls, companies from any sector, regardless of scale, can be consumers of this class of network protection, Shalenkov specified.

The APCS market has certain prospects, but it is difficult to predict them due to several factors, Korostelev said. First, in comparison with the majority of other segments of the cybersecurity market it more “slow”, that is changes in it are strongly extended in time, he specified. Secondly, solutions for protecting the automated process control system of a pipe-rolling enterprise, a refinery or a steel plant have their own specifics, Korostelev added. In addition, protection systems for automated process control systems are a rather narrow profile, where the presence of foreign companies was insignificant before due to the special requirements of the regulator for manufacturers, said Alexei Parfentiev, head of the Serchinform analytics department.

Firewalls, on the contrary, are one of the fastest growing and most popular areas, which is estimated at about 30 billion rubles. year in the prices of vendors, Korostelev noted. In the network security market, the share of firewalls is 64%, while this market is the largest part of the cybersecurity segment as a whole, added Alexander Barinov, Director of RTK-Solar Network Solutions Portfolio. In 2022, the lion’s share of the firewall market was occupied by foreign companies, but almost all of them left the market, abruptly ceasing support for their solutions amid an unprecedented increase in cyber threats, he added.

In the niche of firewalls, the presence of foreign solutions was significant, and the share of domestic solutions did not exceed 10-20%, Kurashev agreed with him. However, now the Russian market is going through a stage of formation of a completely new environment, including in this segment, he added.