The Growing Role of Access Control Systems

The global access control market is expected to grow from a market size of US$6.410 Billion in 2018 to US$9.194 Billion by 2024 with a CAGR of 6.20%. Access Control tools monitor access to environment, system or data to prevent any unauthorized intrusion or misuse of resources. It includes tasks starting with identifying the users’ credentials, checking their credibility through passwords, personal identification numbers, biometric scans, etc. in order to grant entrance to the user. Data, turning to be the biggest asset of the enterprises, demands to be protected from attacks by hackers or cybercriminals who have developed a keen interest and requisite skills to breach the security rules and escape unnoticed.

Factors such as technological advancements (encompassing homes and offices to industries and manufacturing), urbanization and globalization are major demand drivers for the access control market. Parallel to this, cybercrimes are also escalating. Digitalization of processes demands to protect the digital channels and the need to adhere to the safety compliances, imposed by the regulators, make it obligatory for the service providers to keep a robust access control system in place. Citizens’ Right to Privacy can be used as a tool to provide for punitive judgments to the offenders. The ultimate aim is to ensure safe and secure access to any resource.

Access Control Market Analysis by Product    

By product, the access control market is segmented into two broad categories: software and hardware. Hardware dominates the market with more than 80% share by dealing with bio-metrics, cards & readers, mobile phones, electric door lock, control panels etc. The software segment would see high increment owing to the technological innovations over the forecast period via Cloud and Internet of Things based access control systems.

access control market

Access Control Market Analysis by Geography

By geography, the access control market has been segmented into North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific region holds a notable share of the market and is expected to witness a healthy CAGR. The proliferation of the IT Industry due to urbanization and globalization in many countries like India is boosting the demand for access control systems. With the data getting accumulated and leveraged rapidly for a variety of reasons, more and more compliance policies and procedures are getting added to the laws framed by different regions such as North America and Europe. Some regions are more prone than their counterparts to fall prey to such malware or ransomware attacks.

According to the President’s Budget FY 2019 (United States), cybersecurity-related activities’ funding (CFO Act Agencies) saw an increase of 4.1% over FY 2018 by $583.4 million to reach an enormous corpus of $15 billion. The Department of Defence, which is highly susceptible to the data security breach, contributes $8.5 billion to it.

Trends that will matter

The market for Information Security or the amount estimated to be expensed on consultation or implementation of services revolving around data security is expected to grow at a lofty rate. Organizations not only suffer from loss of data or data integrity, but they also face impairment of their goodwill causing the share price to the tank (as in the case of Facebook). A data breach can leak passwords, credit card details, location and other private details. Having said that, this leaked data can be used to manipulate the people for the bad.
The latest tools that will be employed to attack the sanity of the data would be artificial intelligence and machine learning on mobile-based or cloud-based data. Also, as infrastructure technology moves into the 5G spectrum, there exists a possibility of a threat to the new technology and this calls for inspection and detection of the loopholes in this new technology which would involve more spending from the service providers’ end. Within a country, most vulnerable sectors are government, retail and technology.

Demand for jobs in Information security will be facing an upward trend. According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, the number of Information Security Analysts Job in 2018 was 112,300 but is expected to rise by 32% (average rate of all occupations is 5%) from 2018 to 2028. Information Security Analysts are involved in planning, developing and maintaining the security measures for safeguarding the networks and facilities of the organizations, and in case of a security breach, they are obligated to renovate the IT Structure which was taken advantage of. They also need to be cognizant of the state-of-the-art technology which can be employed to shield the information.

Analysis of the access control market makes it evident that this is going to be a sector that would be demanding as well as yielding at the same time. Accelerated advancement in access controls would make it even more complicated to manage.