Written by:
Purandar Das Despite best efforts by information security teams to protect their organizations, cybersecurity incidents have risen 125% year over year. Work from home (WFH) and rapid adoption of cloud infrastructure and services have stretched security teams thin in a market that is already suffering from staffing shortages. With 2022 just starting, many hope this will be the year we all return to business as usual and begin regaining ground on the security challenges of 2021.
To help with this, Sotero has a selection of predictions and market trends to help you better prepare your organization for the year ahead. By knowing what is on the horizon, you can position yourself to take advantage of what is to come.
Consolidation Rises
Privacy and security products will move away from being one-trick-ponies where they accomplish one functionality and do it exceptionally well. As businesses rapidly expanded to accommodate WFH and cloud adoption, organizations have been forced to adopt numerous one-off solutions to help them rapidly meet their needs as they grew. While these solutions each met the individual need they were purchased for, as a collective, managing them became unwieldy.
With the current shortage of skilled information security professionals, companies are looking for more holistic solutions that can deliver on multiple capabilities at once rather than one or two at a time. Solution providers understand this need and, in many cases, are growing their products to be more comprehensive through new capabilities or acquisitions and partnerships.
By simplifying fewer, more comprehensive solutions, companies can better use their limited workforce and more centrally manage and monitor their organization. This will result in organizations being able to detect and respond to incidents more quickly and efficiently.
Data Security is a Competitive Advantage
An organization’s data security state will be an important decision-maker for potential customers in the coming year. Over the last few years, consumers have taken a keen interest in how their data has been used and protected, resulting in such legislation as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA). These regulations have forced businesses to better manage how they use and store customer data.
While business-to-business (B2B) organizations have to comply with these regulations as well as PCI, PHI, PII, and HIPAA, potential customers more are interested in how their data is being protected. They want to know that the services and products they choose have a track record of being good stewards of their data and are unlikely to make headlines for a security breach. Organizations that can show a track record of good security practices, especially if it is independently verified, will use this as a strong selling point in the coming years.
Access is Dynamic
Remote work and cloud infrastructure have demolished the traditional security perimeter of the firewall. To protect data, businesses will need to adapt how they approach data access security. Rather than assigning access once and leaving it forever, a more dynamic approach will be required to move to a zero-standing privilege model. This model is a foundation for Zero Trust where privileges do not persist permanently but instead are time-limited when they are granted. As access is needed, requests will be made, and access can be assigned dynamically and then automatically removed after a set period.
The dynamic model reduces the risk of insider threats and compromised credentials, decreasing the potential impact of an attack. When this is done in conjunction with intelligent threat monitoring along with user and network behavior analysis, questionable access requests can be quickly identified and investigated. By temporarily blocking questionable access, attackers will have a more difficult time making any headway with stolen credentials.
Automation is Key
Automation will play a key role in managing the global workforce shortage. This is not to say that automation will replace existing workers, but instead, that automation will help organizations make the most out of their current workforce. By automating monitoring and simple tasks that are often time-consuming and tedious, skilled security professionals are freed up to apply their time to more effective pursuits such as projects that facilitate organizational improvement.
Automation is also a crucial component of delivering dynamic access. Managing every access request manually is time-consuming and delays the requestor gaining access to the resources they need. In conjunction with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), automated processes can make rapid decisions for low-risk access requests and expediting responses. Then higher risk requests can be manually evaluated, delivering a balance on speed and security.
Monitoring Everything
To catch attacks against your organization before it is too late to do anything about it requires monitoring capabilities. To keep on top of attackers and prepare to adopt initiatives such as zero-trust, the quality and degree of monitoring will be a crucial piece of the puzzle. Organizations will be looking for ways to optimize their monitoring capabilities to collect in-depth information about their entire ecosystem, from cloud to on-premises and view it through a single pane of glass interface to reduce excess labor.
The challenge with additional monitoring is separating the critical indicators from the noise. As part of the move toward better monitoring will need improved methods of highlighting actual threat indicators. This is another place where AI and ML will be central components of improving data. As these technologies are trained to spot actual patterns, they will quickly parse immense volumes of data and elevate the highest priority issues to humans for more in-depth analysis and investigation.
Being Prepared
In 2021, attackers pulled out all the stops to capitalize on the shifting IT architectures of organizations in response to the pandemic. They took advantage of the chaos and rapid growth to find holes in implementation and create footholds for an attack. In 2022, organizations have a chance to take back control and protect their organization.
Organizations will fortify their security foundation for the coming year by shoring up security in existing infrastructure. Your business can prepare by leveraging technologies that simplify your organizational operations and help give you in-depth visibility. This makes the most of your existing workforce and allows you to handle existing threats and whatever new tricks hackers devise in 2022.