Global privacy advisory market topping $3B
What did I find out
The first discovery was that you need to define what you're estimating. Because no one before Computerworld has sized up the privacy sector, that task falls to us.
Defining the market
For starters, I think three segments comprise the sector: privacy advisory services, privacy operations and security of personal information.
All three subsectors are related, but different providers serve each one and they're at different stages of maturity and market-data availability. Among them, the privacy advisory market offers the best data, so that's where I focused this estimate.
Getting to the numbers
There are at least three ways you can size up the dollars in the privacy advisory market:
In my March 2006 column, I only used the first method and put the U.S. privacy consulting market at $400 million. It was a sufficient and reliable method back then because the pool of providers was limited and knowable. This time, now that I have access to more information in my new role, I used all three methods. And, what a relief. They all pointed to the same ballpark number: $3 billion.
Here are some key assumptions and interesting factoids:
Market outlook
Today's privacy advisory market looks like the information security market did 10 years ago as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and mandatory data-breach notification was coming full swing. And where is that market heading today Last month, Gartner projected that spending on information security vendors will hit $101 billion by 2018, at least a quadrupling over the past decade.
Several indicators point to privacy following the same meteoric rise as security:
If the $3 billion estimate is in the ballpark, and it's true there's no one dominant market leader, an upcoming wave of corporate spending is totally up for grabs.
Jay Cline leads the data privacy practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.