As cybersecurity trends keep emerging, organizations must adopt a proactive IT security posture, rather than reactive, to keep business secure. They must become more nimble, more flexible, and more collaborative as they strive to secure their critical assets.
Top predictions that will affect enterprises and cyber security leaders:
Cybercriminals to focus on Remote workers
Cybercriminals took advantage of the pandemic and disrupted to launch phishing, vishing, ransomware, and a whole slew of other attacks that targeted gaps in companies’ security postures, as many were not prepared to support a remote workforce securely.
If organizations don’t rethink their approaches to security, cybercrime will continue to evolve and exploit remote workers as the ideal entry points into corporate IT ecosystems.
Weakning links
VPNs also represent significant liabilities as cybercriminals can easily exploit unpatched VPNs with ransomware. Even a “perfect” VPN setup and deployment is vulnerable to attack. 34% of IT security teams across the globe have shared that they are in the process of implementing a zero-trust security model which can ease many of the challenges presented by a traditional network approach.
Additionally, 60% of enterprises will be phased out of VPNs in favor of zero trust network access by 2023 says research. With a zero-trust implementation, users only have access to the smallest set of permissions necessary to perform their work duties. This trend toward zero trust network access is likely to accelerate in 2021 as organizations realize the gaps that legacy architectures like VPNs pose to their security postures.
Financial & Healthcare beware, more attacks are coming
Financial services organizations and healthcare that are responsible for huge data for the security of consumer financial data must remain vigilant in their cybersecurity efforts throughout 2021. The high value of financial data, including Social Security numbers, banking details, and more, makes it a lucrative target for cybercriminals.
With the projected rise of new technologies – like 5G – throughout the new year, the sophistication of cybercriminals’ attacks will likely be enhanced. Consequently, it is imperative that financial organizations (and all companies in heavily regulated industries) take a proactive approach to data protection.
New technologies and increase in internet users; rise of risk to data exposure
The number of internet users will continue to increase in the coming year, and 84% of organizations will continue to support remote work even after stay at home orders are lifted. Combining these trends with the rapid development and adoption of technologies like 5G (which enables malicious actors to execute attacks and move data much more quickly) suggests that we will see an increase in the number of people around the world who are impacted by data breaches.
Remote work and other technological advantages spurred by stay-at-home orders will long outlast the pandemic. 2021 will also be filled with organizations around the world striving to secure themselves in a more complete, future-proof fashion.
Cloud adoption and threats
As remote work and online collaboration intensified during the coronavirus pandemic, cloud adoption has emerged as an ally for enterprises to ensure business continuity. Though global businesses have been migrating to the cloud before the crisis, the pandemic acted as a catalyst for the same.
Cloud-based security threats, including misconfigured cloud storage, reduced visibility and control, incomplete data deletion, and vulnerable cloud-apps, will continue to disrupt businesses in the future ahead. Right security strategies and solutions, organizations can benefit from new technologies and support their remote workforce without exposing themselves to additional risk.
Data Privacy and Extended detection response(XDR)
The ever growing data breaches, the security teams are pressed to gain visibility of enterprise and customer data across emails, endpoints, networks, servers, cloud workloads, and applications.
The Extended Detection and Response (XDR) is set to gain momentum as they can automatically collect data from multiple endpoints and correlate them to facilitate faster threat detection and incident response.
Data management and security, data privacy, from being a part of compliance requirements, is set to become an increasingly significant, stated discipline of its own.
Data privacy impact almost all aspects of an organization, from co-directing the corporate strategy to closely aligning with security, HR, governance, and procurement.
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