India needs 8.2 lakh cybersecurity professionals: Quess

Bengaluru: India is emerging as a trusted global hub for cybersecurity innovation, transformation, and managed defence. With over 3,80,000 professionals powering identity, cloud, and threat-defence programmes, the country is staring at a talent deficit of over 8,20,000 professionals, a Quess Corp report shows.

The country’s cybersecurity demand is accelerating at an unprecedented speed, led by Identity & Access Architecture (IAM, PAM, CIAM) at about 23%, Threat Intelligence & Response at about 20%, and Automation & Platform Security at about 18%. Together, these clusters account for over 60% of total hiring activity.

The demand is concentrated in GCCs and BFSI captives, with FY25 hiring signals ranging from accelerating in GCCs to selective in MSSPs. Emerging hotspots include Privacy Engineering (DPDP) and DevSecOps pipelines, among digital-native firms.

The latest Cybersecurity Talent Landscape Report from Quess provides a comprehensive view of India’s position as a global cybersecurity delivery hub, covering demand trends, supply composition, compensation differentials, and location strategy across leading capability domains.

According to the report, Bengaluru and Hyderabad continue to anchor the country’s most mature cybersecurity ecosystems, while Pune and Chennai have become strategic centres for SOC modernisation, CloudSec, and DevSecOps. NCR and Mumbai are emerging as governance and privacy strongholds. Tier-2 cities such as Coimbatore, Kochi, and Jaipur now contribute about 8% of the active cybersecurity demand, signalling a deeper national talent footprint.

“The market is witnessing 20-35% pay premiums for specialists in PAM, IGA, Cloud-Native Guardrails, and CNAPP. As enterprises re-architect security around Zero-Trust principles, automation, and digital-trust frameworks, India’s unique blend of technical depth, delivery excellence, and cost efficiency is fast-emerging as a definitive global competitive advantage,” said Quess IT Staffing Chief Executive
Officer Kapil Joshi.

This gap is not a challenge alone — it’s India’s biggest opportunity. By accelerating reskilling, investing in CloudSec, AppSec, and Privacy Engineering, and expanding Tier-2 cyber hubs, India can build the most-scalable, future-ready cybersecurity workforce globally, he added.

India’s cybersecurity roles are converging around automation, cloud, and data governance engineering. The emergence of AI-enabled threat analysis, Zero-Trust architecture, and platform security ownership indicates that the country is moving from a service delivery model to an innovation-led security engineering economy, the report added.