(Yicai Global) Aug. 12 -- China’s new data security law, scheduled to come in on Sept. 1, will serve as the legal foundation for the national big data strategy and is expected to bring new development opportunities for the data security market.

“2021 can be considered the first year of the data security industry,” Liu Bo, senior vice president and chief scientist at DBAPPSecurity, told Yicai Global, adding that the market will grow as data security technology is more closely integrated with industry and is applied in more scenarios.

A major feature of the new law is the focus on the balance between data security and industrial development, industry insiders told Yicai Global.

Privacy enhancing technologies including privacy computing and multi-party secure computing will become a new investment trend, said Wu Shenkuo, executive director of the International Center for Internet Rule of Law at Beijing Normal University and deputy director of the Research Center of the Internet Society of China.

So-called dynamic protection means that in different activity scenarios, the means and measures of security protection will be different for data with different security levels, according to Bai Yajing, founder of data security startup Little Tech Beijing Technology.

“Data is valuable only when it flows,” Bai said. “The privacy enhancing technology needs to be more integrated with the industry to ensure the security, openness, circulation and trade of data.”

“The growing need for security in the flow of data provides an opportunity for operators providing data security governance services,” Liu noted, adding that regulatory pressure and the need for data compliance will create demand for such services from large internet companies and technology giants.

“The enterprise-level data security governance market will offer big opportunities,” Liu said.

In this emerging market, data security startups, big data operators, and technology giants are expected to draw more attention from the capital market, Dr. Fang Yan of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences told Yicai Global, adding that the data security industry will soon be worth at least CNY100 billion (USD15.4 billion).

Editors: Tang Shihua, Tom Litting