What are the key success factors for companies operating in the cybersecurity sector?
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- The cybersecurity industry has expanded rapidly under the pressure of digital transformation, rising threats, and a regulatory environment that increasingly treats security as a governance obligation. Sector growth, however, does not automatically translate into firm-level success. Cybersecurity companies must differentiate in crowded markets, attract limited specialised talent, build trust where service quality is hard to evaluate, and adapt to threats that evolve faster than organisations can plan for. This thesis examines what drives firm-level success in this context, with a focus on the Belgian market. Based on semi-structured interviews with cybersecurity professionals and a hybrid thematic analysis, it identifies six principal determinants of success: specialised human capital, reputation and trust, cyber resilience, dynamic adaptation, regulatory knowledge, and innovation capacity. These operate within an external environment that is simultaneously demanding and enabling. The findings further suggest that the sector is in a moment of competitive reconfiguration, in which regulatory alignment is shifting from differentiator toward baseline expectation, while AI integration remains an anticipated rather than realised competitive frontier.