The cybersecurity world is growing at a rate that few other industries can match. As ransomware, malware, and other types of security threats become commonplace, better, more secure IT systems must be developed to keep businesses safe and avoid payouts to cyber criminals. If you ask cybersecurity executives what they want, whatever their answer, it will include the following:
- Balancing risk, usability, resilience and price
- More visibility and insights into exactly what is taking place within business networks and systems
- Have more control over critical security processes
Nevertheless, these leaders would be the first ones to admit that in the cybersecurity universe, there are extremely hard realities they have to face and that what they want may be a little far from what they can get. They know the reality is that the ability to protect everything does not exist. For that reason, most of them are willing to allocate resources towards those processes that matter most, including towards IT resilience and disaster recovery. In fact, today's cybersecurity experts are in agreement regarding these four things:
- Fixing everything is impossible
- Making sure assets are fully secure is impossible
- A clear understanding of how secure all your assets are cannot be attained
- There is no way of knowing for certain how secure your partners in the digital space really are
As you can clearly see above, the cybersecurity world is full of unknowns. This is what scares many business executives. That said, things are constantly changing, and the absence of a solution yesterday in no way means there won’t be one come tomorrow.
For an industry that moves faster than most, anything is possible. That is why many industry observers are always on the lookout for the emerging trends in this space and the impact they will have on the way things are done in cybersecurity. Here are a number of trends that the experts are carefully observing:
Cybersecurity organization and skills are changing
People with cybersecurity skills are guaranteed of employment in an industry whose unemployment rate stands at zero. In fact, the industry is still in need of cyber security experts, especially those who have created a culture of learning new skills as the industry grows and transitions.
Some of the new areas emerging in cybersecurity include data governance and data classes. Few security experts have shown interest in these areas in the past. However, industry watchers predict that the next few years will see an upsurge in data that enterprises generate, making it necessary and critical that security experts explore data classes as well as data governance.
Furthermore, the demand for data analytics and data science skills will increase exponentially. Already, vast amounts of data have become part and parcel of every business enterprise, making artificial security intelligence and disaster recovery a necessity.
Cloud security is now top priority for most businesses
Cloud computing is fast approaching its maturity, and most business enterprises today have embraced it and all the convenience it brings. Consequently, cyber criminals are working overtime trying to target the cloud environment. It goes without saying that they will, at some point start succeeding in their criminal acts resulting in increased security challenges for the cloud.
In fact, it is not unthinkable that shared cloud services might become unsecured and unstable as more companies join in and the demands on it increase. For this reason, one likely scenario is security experts starting to make decisions regarding who they are willing to trust and who they are not. Additionally, companies will have to come up with security guidelines that will govern the public and private use of the cloud.
We will also see companies begin to shift a significant portion of the resources set for prevention of cyber-attacks to detection and response. As more business leaders come to terms with the fact that it is not possible to prevent every threat, they will demand a shift to response as well as remediation. And in the future, experts believe a time will come when businesses will be able to predict the cyberattack that’s coming before it is launched.
Digital ecosystems will drive the next phase of cybersecurity
Safety, privacy and reliability are part of security in the cyberspace. When cybersecurity systems begin having a physical impact on people and institutions, those in the cybersecurity industry must realize that they are partly responsible for the security and safety of the environments and the people that use these systems. Today, failing to have clear control on cybersecurity can result to deaths of people.
