DIGITAL FORENSICS MARKET ANALYSIS

Digital Forensics Market Size and Trends

The digital forensics market is estimated to be valued at USD 7.12 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach USD 15.52 billion by 2031, exhibiting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.8% from 2024 to 2031. With the rising instances of cybercrimes, the demand for solutions that can capture, evaluate, and analyze digital evidence is growing significantly.

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The market is expected to witness prominent growth owing to increasing investments by various government and law enforcement agencies worldwide in digital forensic solutions to address cybercrimes and the need for efficient and effective investigation processes. Furthermore, the widespread adoption of smart devices and proliferation of internet connectivity has led to a surge in cybercrimes like hacking and data breaches, thereby driving the need for robust digital forensic solutions in the coming years.

New avenues for digital forensics

With the growing adoption of technologies like AI, IoT, cloud computing, and Blockchain across industries, new opportunities are emerging for digital forensics companies. As these disruptive technologies become mainstream, the volume and varieties of digital evidence are escalating exponentially. AI and IoT devices are generating immense amount of data that contains sensitive personal and organizational information. At the same time, technologies like cloud and Blockchain have made data storage highly distributed and decentralized. This has challenged the traditional methods used by investigative agencies and enterprises to gather, analyze and investigate digital evidence.

To cope with this transformation, digital forensics specialists need to develop new techniques and tools that can retrieve, interpret and attribute digital artifacts from these emerging technologies. There is a pressing need to understand how data is generated, processed and stored in AI systems to deduce evidential insights. New protocols also need to be devised for forensically sound acquisition of data from IoT devices and networks. Investigators also find it difficult to retrieve encrypted data or data distributed across multiple nodes in the cloud or Blockchain environments. This demands research into methods like cloud forensics and Blockchain forensics. With organizational and personal data more exposed to cyber threats through these technologies, the demand is also surging for digital forensic experts trained in these new domain areas. Various R&D initiatives and collaborations between digital forensics firms, universities, and technology leaders can help address these evolving requirements.

For instance, in May 2022, Cisco AppDynamics and Alertops formed a technology integration partnership, offering users advanced alerting, escalation policies, workflows, and scheduling for efficient major incident resolution.

Growth of cybercrimes

The rising incidence of cybercrimes like hacking, phishing, malware attacks, and ransomware incidents have accentuated the need for digital forensics across various industry verticals. Cybercriminals are employing sophisticated techniques to steal sensitive personal and financial information of individuals and organizations. Malware infections are also causing significant business disruptions and operational downtimes. Such crimes often leave behind a digital trail which needs to be gathered, examined, and linked to perpetrators through forensic investigation methods. This has led to increasing engagement of digital forensics experts by law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, and enterprises across sectors for post-incident response and remediation.

With the proliferation of online platforms and digital devices in our personal and professional lives, more and opportunistic as well as organized cybercriminals are actively targeting vulnerable systems and data. As the attacks are growing in severity and scale, the demand is surging from organizations to hire dedicated cybersecurity operation centers. For instance, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center, in 2022, there were 1,802 data compromises in the U.S., affecting 422.14 million individuals.