EU civil security market: overcoming the fragmentation of the EU civil security market for security technologies

Today’s security threats are evolving fast, complex, and often cross-border in nature. Effectively dealing with such threats requires a collective response across EU countries operating within an efficient Security Union. Nevertheless, the EU civil security market remains largely under-studied and fragmented across geographies, security areas and industries. Therefore, the Directorate General for Migration and Home Affairs commissioned Ecorys, in a consortium with Deloitte, to build a sound overview of the EU security market and to provide the necessary data allowing for a better analysis of its dynamics, including trends regarding its future evolution.

To do so, the study is structured around several interrelated activities: first, the study characterises the EU Security Market by developing a market segmentation rationale, a mapping and catalogue stakeholders and a taxonomy of security products and services. Next, it provides a comprehensive view of the dynamics of the market in terms of value, supply and demand, competition and trends now and in the future. Finally, it brings forward conclusions and recommendations for the security market regarding policymaking, technology, investment and data. An important consideration for this study is the alignment between security research, the industry, and the EU priorities in security policy.

EU civil security taxonomy and online taxonomy explorer 

As a key output of the study, the research team developed a comprehensive taxonomy of security solutions and an online taxonomy explorer. The taxonomy provides a comprehensive and detailed reference for security products and services built around two levels of aggregation:

1. the four main security research areas of the European Commission:

• disaster risk management;
• resilience of critical infrastructure;
• border management and
• fight against crime and terrorism.

2. the security functions that a given product or service enables or supports (i.e., functional areas).

The Security Taxonomy contains over 550 products and services, across 13 functional areas.

Read the final results of the study.

Explore the online taxonomy explorer.