NCC Group plc Annual Report 2021

Although competition for customers and talent is also growing, our continued portfolio evolution and differentiation enable us to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities the cyber services market offers, fuelling our growth now and in the future.

Competition for talent In addition, competition for talent continues unabated, not least as regulatory authorities are equally seeking to fill their capability gaps as they discharge their new responsibilities. As the global pandemic has driven remote working models more widely, we have, moreover, experienced external challenges to our traditionally uncontested talent pools, for example, where US technology companies have acquired talent in the European and Asia Pacific regions.

NCC Group’s continued portfolio evolution and differentiation

Through our combined Cyber and Software Resilience offering, we are uniquely placed to offer our customers – current and new – easy-to-access peace of mind in an ever-more complex digital world. Our service orientated research and development, and selective investments to meet our customers’ changing challenges and demands have and will allow us to: • Evolve our penetration testing services to address risks of commoditisation • Establish our Managed Detection and Response offering as a leading proposition in a competitive and diverse space, building on a full suite of incident response and threat intelligence services across a leading, sovereign European business, while adding analytical and machine learning approaches to our threat detection, to offer customers insight and context into malicious activity and response capabilities to identify and mitigate sophisticated cyber threats • Innovate to integrate Microsoft Sentinel into our offering which means we are fully equipped to manage threat monitoring and detection for Microsoft customers • Differentiate our Remediate service against competition from system integrators, generalist consultancies and fragmented boutiques, through our technical depth, expertise, scale and global footprint which mean we are able to work with our customers to assess their existing risk position, and prioritise and fix security weaknesses as part of a structured improvement plan to reduce their cyber risk • Enhance our Software Resilience capabilities into a market- leading combination of service modernisation and trusted reputation, through the acquisition of Iron Mountain’s Intellectual Property Management (IPM) business, which completed on 7 June 2021, and the continued innovation in cloud-delivered services and a next generation Software-as-a-Service platform for digital escrow deposits and secure digital vault storage Finally, our tenure, stability and reputation mean we remain an attractive destination for global talent at all stages of their career and we continue to invest in creating a world-class environment in which everybody is welcome and can be successful.

Growing competition for customers and talent

Continued portfolio evolution and differentiation

Competition for customers As board-level and senior executive understanding – and liability – grows, cyber and software resilience is increasingly seen as a strategic investment. That also means that the competitive landscape continues to be busy on all fronts, and that new and disruptive ways of working and service delivery come to market frequently. Excitement about new and emerging technologies – from artificial intelligence to quantum computing – that infuse traditional cyber offerings continues unabated. By way of example, venture capital activity until May 2021 rivalled the full-year activity level in 2020 and continues on an upward trajectory, and private equity investment continues to focus on the typical “platform buy and bolt on” strategies across cyber services and technology domains globally. We’ve also seen continued evolution in penetration testing to continuous, automated and on-demand/crowd-sourced models and experienced competitive pressures in the Managed Detection and Response space, and from regionally and vertically aligned specialists in the wider Software Resilience offering.

NCC Group plc — Annual report and accounts for the year ended 31 May 2021

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