DCMS Uses Glass.AI to Track the Growth of the Cyber Security Sector in the UK.
With cyber threats becoming increasingly more of a concern, the UK government has recently committed to strengthening the UK cyber sector and published a National Cyber Strategy in December of 2021 setting out how it will continue to ensure the UK is established as key global cyber power through building cutting-edge cyber security capabilities and ensuring collaboration across the cyber security ecosystem.
One tool that fed into the Cyber Strategy is the Cyber Security Sectoral Analyses that the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has undertaken since 2018 to track the growth of the sector. Previous studies have been undertaken by economic consultancy Perspective Economics and Ipsos UK using traditional business data sets. A limitation of this approach has been that the cyber security sector does not have a formal Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code which limits the ease with which these data sets can be used for developing a sector baseline.
For their most recently published study, Perspective Economics and Ipsos UK partnered with glass.ai and built a taxonomy of terms to identify and classify cyber security activity. Using our intelligent crawler, we were able to crawl the UK business web and identify candidate firms involved in the cyber security sector. Relying on key terms alone leads to many false positives in results and inflated coverage, however, the glass.ai web-scale language understanding technology applies the terms in the context of our business-oriented language models to precisely uncover the members of emerging sectors, such as cyber security.
The 2022 study resulted in increased coverage of the sector, identifying 1,838 cyber businesses in the UK and estimating that the total annual revenue for the sector was over £10 billion, which is twice the growth rate recorded in the previous year. The sector employs over 52,000 cyber security professionals in the UK (recruiting an additional 6,000 people in the last twelve months alone) and it has raised, for the first time, over £1bn in external investment in a calendar year. The blossoming of the cyber security sector continues to be one of the UK’s tech success stories.