Ransomware, Regulation & Resilience: Decoding UK Cybersecurity's Growth Surge with Rohan B.

Rohan B. analyzes UK cybersecurity’s £13bn growth, ransomware impact, and talent gap solutions. Insights on AI threats, regulation, and industry evolution

As ransomware cripples critical infrastructure and AI reshapes threat landscapes, the UK's cybersecurity sector defies economic headwinds. Yet beneath this expansion lie tectonic challenges: skills gap, relentless vendor fragmentation, and regulatory whiplash from GDPR to NIS2.

Rohan B., Customer Success Manager at Intigriti, operates at this convergence of cybersecurity innovation and real-world business resilience. Rohan's frontline experience, from AI-driven threat detection to architecting bug bounty ecosystems, positions him uniquely to dissect these tensions. In this interview, we explore how UK businesses can navigate tool sprawl, leverage regulatory catalysts, and transform talent shortages into opportunities for systemic reinvention.

Interview with Rohan B.

What are the key factors driving the growth of the cybersecurity industry in the UK over the past few years?

The rapid evolution of the tech space following the COVID-19 pandemic has been a major catalyst for the growth of the cybersecurity industry, especially in the UK. As digital transformation shifted from a competitive advantage to an operational necessity, businesses and individuals moved to the digital space drastically.

With remote and hybrid-work becoming the new norm, this abrupt transition exposed a wide range of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, including unsecured home networks, increased use of cloud services, and reliance on digital collaboration tools.

This essentially led an urgent prompt of investments in protect individuals and company data. The pandemic didn’t just boost technology adoption - it dramatically expanded the attack surface available to cybercriminals, making organizations more vulnerable to phishing, ransomware, and other sophisticated attacks.

In response, demand surged for advanced cybersecurity solutions and support services such as managed detection and response (MDR), cloud security, endpoint protection, and services provided by MSSPs.

Additionally, regulatory pressures and evolving compliance requirements, like GDPR and the NIS Directive, further drove businesses to prioritize cybersecurity investments. The combined effect of technological change, evolving threat landscapes, and regulatory frameworks has created a dynamic and rapid expanding market for cybersecurity products and services in the UK.

How has the increasing frequency of cyberattacks, especially ransomware, influenced the demand for cybersecurity solutions within the UK market?

The rising number of severe cyberattacks, particularly ransomware, has significantly heightened awareness and demand for cybersecurity solutions across the UK market. A successful cyber breach is no longer just a technical issue; it carries lasting reputational damage, almost like an asterisk permanently attached to a company’s name.

Even when organizations recover operationally, the breach often leaves a long-term trust deficit among customers, investors, and regulators—especially if it resulted from preventable gaps in security oversight.

The UK health sector is no stranger to being targeted by such attacks. High-profile incidents, such as the ransomware attack on the NHS that led to over 11,000 postponed outpatient appointments and procedures, have brought the real-world consequences of cyberattacks into sharp focus. This has pushed both public and private sector organizations to invest more proactively in cybersecurity infrastructure, services, and expertise.

As the threat landscape continues to evolve, there is now a growing recognition that the UK’s regulatory framework must remain vigilant and adaptive, ensuring it can respond accordingly to any emerging threats while enforcing accountability across critical sectors.

What are some of the biggest challenges UK businesses face when it comes to cybersecurity, and how are these challenges evolving?

One of the biggest challenges UK businesses face in cybersecurity today is the overwhelming saturation of tools and vendors in the market. With countless options, from endpoint protection to threat intelligence platforms and AI-powered security tools - organisations often struggle to identify which solutions offer the best value, versus those that simply follow trends.

This challenge is compounded by executive pressure, from the top-down, to adopt emerging technologies, such as AI, without fully understanding the associated risks or long-term implications. In many cases, adopting the “latest thing” is seen as a signal of innovation, and not doing so may brand a company as outdated, even if the decision to hold off is strategic.

From my discussions with CISOs, Heads of Cybersecurity, and Application Security Managers, a common pain point is the disconnect between the volume of security vulnerabilities and the limited resources available to address them. Teams are expected to remediate thousands of issues with tight budgets, minimal headcount, and increasing expectations from boards and regulators. This forces security leaders to make tough decisions under pressure about which threats to tackle first and which to defer.

Additionally, the evolving threat landscape is making it harder for companies to keep pace. Attackers are leveraging automation, AI, and social engineering to craft more sophisticated and targeted attacks, while many defenders are still relying on outdated processes or under-integrated toolsets.

Ultimately, the key challenge lies in finding a balance: investing in the right tools, developing internal capabilities, staying compliant, and responding to an increasingly aggressive threat environment—all while operating under constrained budgets and growing expectations.

How do regulatory changes and government initiatives in the UK, such as the NIS Directive and the Data Protection Act, impact the cybersecurity landscape?

Now more than ever, digital data has become a critical asset, essential to protecting both individual privacy and business operations. This has pushed organisations to think far beyond the traditional mindset of simply storing data securely in a server room with a single layer password. Instead, they are being compelled to adopt more comprehensive strategies to defend against increasingly sophisticated threat actors.

Regulatory changes and government initiatives in the UK - such as the NIS Directive and the Data Protection Act, have influenced this shift by mandating enhanced security controls, incident response measures, and greater organizational accountability. These frameworks not only raise the bar for security standards, but also drive innovation across the industry.

What we are seeing as a result of this, are companies exploring dynamic and proactive approaches to security that go beyond annual penetration tests or ad-hoc internal audits. For example, the growing popularity of bug bounty programs, which enlist ethical hackers to continuously probe systems for vulnerabilities, reflects a cultural and regulatory shift in how risk is managed.

Just 10 to 20 years ago, relying on independent hackers to help secure a business would have been considered risky or even unthinkable. However today, this approach is increasingly seen as a valuable extension of an organization’s security capabilities, helping them better understand their real-world exposure and prioritize remediation efforts accordingly.

These evolving practices underscore how regulation is not only shaping compliance requirements but also encouraging more agile, innovative, and realistic approaches to securing the modern digital landscape.

What role do emerging technologies like AI and machine learning play in both shaping the cybersecurity industry and posing new threats to UK businesses?

AI and machine learning are quickly reshaping the cybersecurity landscape – this is not new news. While machine learning has been lightly integrated into cybersecurity tools for years in some form, recent advances have pushed it to the forefront, enabling faster threat detection, automating manual processes, and improving response times. These technologies allow security teams to analyse vast amounts of data and identify anomalies that would otherwise go unnoticed.

However, these same capabilities are also being used to empower attackers too. AI is now being used to automate phishing, generate deepfakes, and create more adaptive malware, making threats harder to detect. Additionally, there’s growing concern about job displacement, as AI begins to take over tasks traditionally handled by human analysts.

Despite these risks, if implemented strategically, AI can act as a force multiplier rather than a replacement e.g. supporting security teams, augmenting processes and efficiency. This in turn, will help UK businesses fight fire with fire and tackle these new challenging threats.

In what ways is the talent shortage in cybersecurity affecting the growth of the industry in the UK, and what strategies are companies using to address this gap?

The cybersecurity industry in the UK is growing rapidly - faster than many businesses can keep up with. While threats become more advanced and frequent, many organisations are struggling to scale their security operations due to budget constraints and a shortage of skilled talent, especially in the AI space. This talent gap creates a bottleneck, limiting the ability of businesses to respond to threats effectively.

Having worked at an AI-driven cybersecurity company that uses machine learning to detect anomalies in business operations, and now working in a company that offers bug bounty platform to businesses, I’ve seen first-hand how companies are diversifying their approach to overcome workforce limitations.

Many are turning to alternative strategies that supplement their in-house teams. Bug bounty platforms, for example, allow organisations to tap into a global network of ethical hackers (white-hat researchers) who are incentivised to find and report vulnerabilities. This approach offers a scalable and cost-effective way to boost security coverage, especially when internal resources are stretched thin.

UK-based fintech companies like Monzo and Revolut are strong examples of organizations embracing these alternative models. By leveraging the creativity and expertise of the wider security community, they’re not only improving their security posture but also fostering a more collaborative and proactive cybersecurity culture. Services like bug bounty programs don’t replace internal teams, they augment them - filling critical gaps with a flexible and diverse set of skills that are often hard to source through traditional hiring.

Ultimately, addressing the talent shortage requires a multi-faceted strategy: investing in automation and AI tools to reduce manual workload, creating clear pathways for cybersecurity education and upskilling, and embracing external support models like crowdsourced security testing.

These combined approaches will be key to sustaining growth and resilience in the UK's cybersecurity industry.