38 Cyber Security Business Ideas to Launch in 2024
Cyber threats are growing every year. As more business and personal data moves online, demand increases for services to keep that data safe. This creates major opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs to launch cybersecurity businesses.
I’ve started many companies over my career. Through that experience, I’ve learned how to spot promising new business ideas. And cyber security stands out right now as an industry ripe with potential.
In this post, I’ll share 38 exciting cybersecurity business ideas you can launch. I’ll overview each concept at a high level to spur your thinking.
I aim to get your creative juices flowing so you can identify the right idea for you to pursue.
Growing Industry with Lots of Potential
Before jumping to the ideas, let’s quickly look at why cybersecurity is so appealing for startups…
The cyber security market is expanding rapidly. Research forecasts it growing from around $167 billion in 2022 to over $400 billion by 2030. That’s an annual growth rate of 11%.
With more business functions happening digitally, companies must protect themselves. A data breach can lead to reputational damage, lawsuits, and loss of customers.
Consumers also seek security. Identity theft and hacking can disrupt people’s financial lives. So they too are eager for cyber safety products and services.
This rising demand against limited supply equals opportunity. Smart entrepreneurs can stake their claim in this industry and build defensible businesses.
Here are 38 promising cybersecurity business ideas you can launch to help secure our digital world:
Consulting and Professional Services
Cyber Security Consulting – As a cybersecurity consultant, you help clients evaluate risks, implement controls, meet compliance standards, and respond to incidents. Develop specialized skills in vulnerability assessments, policy development, access controls, BC/DR planning, and regulatory frameworks to provide well-rounded guidance tailored to each customer’s needs.
Penetration Testing – Offer network and application penetration testing to probe infrastructures for security flaws before hackers exploit them. Master technical vulnerability scanning and exploitation tools. Develop methodologies to test systems efficiently, document issues, and provide remediation advice. Stay updated on emerging attack techniques to replicate real-world threats.
Compliance Consulting – Help companies navigate the myriad and ever-changing compliance regulations around cybersecurity and data privacy. Ensure they have the policies, programs, access controls, auditing capabilities, training, and other technology measures in place to demonstrate compliance with laws like HIPAA, PCI DSS, GLBA, SOX, and GDPR. Keep current as new rulings emerge.
Incident Response Services – Provide swift incident response when clients suffer a malware infection, ransomware attack, data breach, or other security incident. Offer services to isolate threats, investigate the root cause, restore affected systems and data from backup, plug vulnerabilities that were exploited, and manage communications with law enforcement as well as public relations around notifications.
Forensic Investigations – Conduct comprehensive digital forensic examinations when clients experience a cyber attack or breach. Preserve evidence securely, recover deleted files, analyze log data, decode encryption, crack passwords, and leverage other techniques to determine root cause, assess damage, and gather legally defensible evidence to support insurance claims or civil and criminal litigation.
Network Architecture Design – Architect and implement secure enterprise network infrastructures encompassing LAN/WLAN, WAN, cloud connectivity, and SD-WAN components. Design contemporary zero-trust architectures with micro-segmentation, dynamic access controls, and multi-layer threat prevention tailored to client risk tolerance, compliance needs, and technology standards.
Cryptography as a Service – Offer data encryption, tokenization, hashing, key management, and associated cryptography services through easy to integrate Platform-as-a-Service and API offerings usable at scale across client applications needing to protect data at rest, in motion, and in use against compromise. Maintain keys and accelerate cryptographic operations using FIPS-validated hardware security modules to maximize trust.
Cybersecurity Staff Augmentation – Provide highly skilled cybersecurity personnel to clients on a project or temporary basis to fill talent gaps without the need for full-time hiring. Supply specialty roles like cloud security architects, penetration testers, incident responders, compliance analysts, and security engineers to assist with overflow work or projects where niche expertise is required.
Cybersecurity Tutoring – Offer private and group cyber safety and skills tutoring to everyday computer users wanting to protect themselves online. Teach core knowledge around password management, multi-factor authentication, social engineering detection, secure web browsing, email security, malware avoidance, encryption, and online privacy tailored for adults and children at all skill levels in this domain.
Security Architecture Design – Conceptualize and map future-proofed enterprise security architectures encompassing integrated controls and visibility spanning DevOps pipelines, cloud, networks, IoT devices, applications, data, users, and underlying identity frameworks. Model architectures promoting frictionless user experience while still strengthening risk management, compliance, and threat prevention.
Security Operations Center (SOC) Consulting – Design, build, and run outsourced security operations centers (SOCs) on clients’ behalf. Develop monitoring use cases aligned to organization size and risk tolerance. Hire, onboard, and manage SOC analysts with expertise in threat hunting, forensics and response. Continually tune the SOC’s toolchain, headcount, processes, and reporting to maximize value over time.
Cyber Insurance Actuarial Services – Leverage vast datasets of historical cyber losses and claims against insured clients to statistically model annualized loss expectancies (ALE) covering existing and emerging attack types. Develop credible cyber risk models and probabilistic scenarios to guide the development of insurance products and premiums across the industry.
Cyber Risk Quantification – Quantify clients’ cyber risk exposure in financial terms both annually and cumulatively over multi-year durations using methodologies blending quantitative and qualitative assessments. Model potential cyber losses factoring insurance limits and uninsured costs to persuade executives and boards to invest appropriately in security and risk transfer.
Data Privacy Consulting – Guide clients on managing personal data to meet expanding privacy regulations regarding the right to access, delete, and restrict processing in jurisdictions subject to GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, and other emerging rules. Update policies, obtain consent, enable subject requests, perform DPIAs, and implement other measures to avoid fines for non-conformance.
Security Products
Endpoint Security Software – Develop specialized endpoint security software focused on anti-malware, firewall, and intrusion prevention capabilities. Or provide integrated endpoint protection platforms encompassing CVE patching, application control, DLP, EDR, and managed threat hunting services across employee computers, servers, mobiles, and cloud-based assets.
Network Security Software – Create solutions to secure corporate networks including next-generation firewalls to filter unwanted traffic, IPS tools to block known threats, secure web gateways, attack simulation platforms, and network access control mechanisms to only allow authorized devices. Bake in advanced features like malware sandboxes, URL filtering, data loss prevention, and more.
Home Network Security Installations – Audit home WiFi networks, routers, modems, and connected IoT devices then implement additional layers like firewalls, DNS filtering, advanced threat detection, and antivirus controls to improve safety and performance for all household members. Provide ongoing management and monitoring. Upsell full home cyber security bundles.
Email Security Software – Develop software, cloud services, and appliances to protect corporate inboxes, servers, and archives against phishing, BEC scams, spam, malware, and other attacks propagated through email. Features may include machine learning for better detection, email encryption, data loss prevention, and integrations with other security layers.
Application Security Software – Build application security products and services tailored to offset risks business apps pose as attack vectors. Core features can include static + dynamic scanning to detect flaws, API attack protection, runtime application self-protection to prevent exploitation, cloud WAF to filter web traffic, and CDN to absorb DDoS attempts.
Identity and Access Management Software – Provide identity and access management capabilities allowing enterprises to control access to resources based on user roles while meeting strict security and compliance requirements. Core IAM features involve single sign-on, adaptive multi-factor authentication, just-in-time provisioning/de-provisioning, and robust auditing.
Security Analytics Software – Develop security analytics tools to rapidly collect, analyze, contextualize, and visualize network traffic, system logs, endpoint data, and other system telemetry to detect cyber threats and anomalies. Identify threats missed by other controls. Present high-value alerts and investigations focused on true positives.
Managed Security Services
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) – Operate a 24/7 security operations center (SOC) leveraging threat intelligence, custom detection rules, and elite human analysts to continuously monitor client networks, critical assets, logs, endpoints, and cloud environments. Rapidly detect threats early and offer swift incident response services backed by legal and insurance partnerships.
Secure Email Gateway – Offer a cloud-based secure email gateway service to efficiently protect companies from phishing, BEC scams, email ransomware, and other attacks targeting inboxes. Filter unwanted mail, sandbox unknown attachments, block malicious links, and credential theft attempts. Instantly scale to any client size without added infrastructure.
DDoS Protection – Maintain global scrubbing centers and content delivery network (CDN) capabilities to filter and absorb large volumetric DDoS attacks targeting client websites and infrastructure. Withstand floods of malicious traffic so clients stay online and protect against business disruption as well as ballooning cloud service charges.
Managed Firewall Service – Deploy and expertly monitor and manage next-generation firewalls across client sites and cloud environments. Continuously tune firewall policies aligned to each client’s risk profile as new vulnerabilities and threats emerge. Maintain optimal uptime and performance. Evolve architectures as users, data, and applications shift between on-prem and cloud.
Cloud Workload Protection – As an MSSP, provide integrated toolsets and services optimized specifically to protect public cloud workloads across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS environments. Core capabilities involve CASB to control shadow IT and data movement, CSPM to lock down misconfigurations, CWPP to enforce hardening baselines, 24/7 monitoring, and incident response.
Cybersecurity Training
Security Awareness Training – Develop engaging cybersecurity awareness training content tailored to different client workforces from executives to IT to end users. Update continuously on modern social engineering tactics, top vulnerabilities, and security habits to teach employees how to keep sensitive client data safe.
Cyber Ranges – Build hands-on cyber ranges hosting virtual replicas of real-world networks, systems, software, and vulnerabilities. Design immersive simulations and scenarios aligned to diverse skill levels for corporate security teams to master practical security skills from open-source intelligence to digital forensics without impacting production.
Virtual CISO Services – Offer seasoned Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)-level advice to small and mid-size businesses through monthly consulting. Review current security organization, staffing, budgets, roadmaps, controls, and posture. Recommend pragmatic improvements to manage risk and meet compliance goals without overspending. Help interpret regulations, guide technology decisions, and mentor internal teams.
Identity and Access Management
Identity-as-a-Service – With Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS), operate a multi-tenant cloud identity platform allowing enterprises to integrate single sign-on, adaptive multi-factor authentication, just-in-time user provisioning, role-based access controls, and robust auditing across web, mobile, API, IoT and on-premises applications to improve convenience, security and compliance.
Privileged Access Management – Prevent unauthorized access to privileged accounts while enabling authorized admins to seamlessly access the elevated access they need without hindering productivity. Log and record all sessions. Quickly de-provision access when employees leave or change roles. Meet compliance mandates for controlling superuser and service accounts across hybrid environments.
Specialized Security Services
Application Security Testing – Perform static and dynamic application testing against custom web, mobile, and thick-client apps under development and already in production across on-prem and cloud environments. Assess security posture and uncover flaws from cryptography issues to injection attacks to validate code and configurations meet industry standards.
IoT and Embedded Device Security – Evaluate Internet of Things devices like smart home tech along with embedded systems such as building controls and medical technology for risks introduced against corporate networks and safety-critical functions. Uncover vulnerabilities then provide hardened configurations plus monitoring to protect against disruptive cyber attacks.
Automotive Cybersecurity – Assess vulnerabilities in modern connected and autonomous vehicles. Perform penetration testing against telematics systems, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, infotainment centers, data logging units, Powertrain, and ADAS control systems. Validate conformance to standards like ISO 21434 and UNECE WP.29.
Cyber Insurance Services
Cyber Insurance Broker – Broker tailored cyber insurance products from leading carriers to align to clients’ unique risk profiles, industries and compliance obligations. Guide underwriting process. Advise policy renewals. Ensure adequate coverage when losses occur. Negotiate optimal premiums and quickly connect clients to legal and incident response partners during crises.
Security Rating Services – Provide audits benchmarking clients against established industry security frameworks to determine a quantitative security rating. Continuously test controls and grade clients to maintain updated scores. Offer remediation guidance to help clients achieve implementation milestones unlocking cyber insurance premium discounts.
Threat Intelligence & Forensics
Malware Analysis Services – Reverse engineer malware samples such as viruses, ransomware, spyware, and trojan binaries collected from client devices and systems. Analyze code using disassemblers, debuggers, and sandboxes to understand malicious behaviors and develop threat intelligence, detection rules, and removal techniques. Document malware capabilities, vectors, impacts, and mutability trends across campaigns.
Secure Code Auditing – Audit client application source code including custom web, thick client, mobile, embedded, IoT, and cloud-based apps for flaws against established standards like OWASP Top 10 and CWE Top 25 along with industry benchmarks like HIPAA and PCI DSS to uncover weaknesses introducing risk of hacking, fraud, and data theft before systems are deployed live.
