Report: China’s network security spending set to double in first half of 2021

China is set to increase its spending on network security by 110 percent in the first half of the year to $1.1 billion when compared with 2020 -- that’s a year-on-year increase of 38 percent compared with 2019, according to a new report by the marketing intelligence firm, IDC.

The appetite for network security products and services is partly a result of the Cybersecurity Law China promulgated in 2017 that, among other things, has required network operators to store much of their data in-country. The result has been a run on everything from products and services for traditional network testing and monitoring to creating a new market for cloud providers and hosting services, the report said.

Security consultancy spending, for example, rose an eye-popping 172 percent year-on-year, the report said. (COVID likely put a crimp in the market last year, the report said, because lots of consulting services were put on hold during various lock-downs. Now, it said, they have returned with a vengeance.)

Also adding to the breakneck growth: an increase in so-called “smart city” spending and other infrastructure-related projects that have required a generation of training people to understand network systems.

The report said China’s server market also saw a boom, increasingly 85.1% year-on-year, to $2.19 billion. GPU servers made up 91.9 percent of the purchases, the report said, and Inspur, Ningchang, and Huawei accounted for about 70 percent of the market.