The ‘new reality’ is forcing cyber security to be more vigilant and more proactive than ever. It is currently undergoing a revolution as new changes transform the way data and networks are organized.
To achieve a state of resilience from cyber security risk, businesses need to develop a highly mature security posture. They need to establish integrated controls and solutions depending upon processes, procedures, and policies.
An evolving threat landscape, increased digital risk, COVID-19 themed attacks, and remote workforce vulnerabilities are among a growing list of challenges that businesses have to face head-on.
Most businesses have been quick to react, managing the business resilience and digital trust needs of a remote workforce. Scaling up company-wide security frameworks to secure multiple endpoints, cloud integrity, digital trust, data security, online identity verification, and the lack of physical security has become a top priority to seamlessly maintaining operations.
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Organizations that provided digital flexibility, boosted their online presence, and granted security waivers as a part of their immediate response to the pandemic, should now adapt their security controls to retain the longer-term benefits of the digital shifts.
Data Control
Collaborative remote working in the last few months forced organizations to provide employees with more access to critical information and data across multiple platforms.
It is critical that organizations attain increased visibility into this confidential data and into who has access to it and what they’re doing with that information. From now on, traditional means of controlling data will become less effective, and businesses must realize this.
Ransomware in the Cloud
The increased need for virtual collaboration in the remote working environment will continue to drive the rapid acceleration of cloud adoption. Today, most businesses store substantial portions of their sensitive and confidential data in external, cloud-based repositories for ease of remote access and collaboration. However, these data stores are less visible to the security function and are not backed up or secured in a way that threat actors are unable to access.
CISOs expect cyber criminals to target the cloud with ransomware attacks drifting toward the cloud to maximize impact and increase leverage to boost profits.
Social Engineering Attacks
Cyber criminals will continue to shift their focus to social engineering attacks to trick users. With a majority of cyber-attacks starting via email, and malware relying on user action for the initial compromise, social engineering will continue to be a successful tool for cyber-criminals.
Read More: Protecting wireless protocols from data breach
Cyber security’s biggest issue – email account compromise (EAC) attacks, and business email compromise (BEC) – have been successful mostly due to social engineering and user interaction. CISOs believe that BEC threat actors will continue to broaden their toolsets to compromise cloud accounts, the vendors, and suppliers, making it a huge challenge to stop them.
Widespread Adoption of Automation
The pandemic has resulted in diminished security budgets, and the IT teams are more stretched than ever. As a result of budget cuts and a shortage of security talent, security functions can survive in 2021 only by automating parts of their role.
Up until now, automation functionalities were addressed by buying additional tools or as bolt-on functions from suppliers.
But, as we advance, CISOs expect automation to become more of a standard feature for most enterprise security tools.
