Over the last two years, chief information security officers (CISOs) have had to contend with a more hostile cybersecurity landscape, with cyber-attacks increasing in volume, velocity, and sophistication—a problem exacerbated by the borderless IT environment in which many CISOs found themselves working.
Organizations should establish a robust cybersecurity plan as the security landscape continues to become increasingly complicated, containing an arsenal of threats and vulnerabilities. CISOs are working on methods that will protect their firms from cyber-attack losses and strengthen the position of cyber-security as a contributor to the bottom line.
In 2022, CISOs and other security experts should concentrate on the following strategies.
Also Read: Is the Cybersecurity Skills Gap a Resourcing Problem?
Create a strong cybersecurity foundation
Other cybersecurity investments will be harmed if the foundation isn’t strong enough. CISOs prefer to base their systems on well-known frameworks. Asset management, configuration controls, password management, patching, vulnerability management, threat detection and prevention, security reporting, and user security awareness are all covered by the frameworks.
Any foundation should also accept the fact that the majority of an organization’s employees will no longer operate in secure, controlled office locations. As the use of e-commerce, online services, and videoconferencing grows, and hybrid remote work scenarios become more frequent, threats will have more opportunities to cause havoc. That means that a CISO’s cybersecurity controls should provide always-on, multi-layered, adaptive protection against present and upcoming threats. Security controls should be updated on a regular basis, based on global threat intelligence and previous attack history.
Secure cloud infrastructures
The shift to the public cloud and cloud-native resources had already begun prior to the pandemic; the pandemic only hastened it. Now there’s no turning back.
Organizations are starting to realize this, especially when they transition from infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to the platform as a service (PaaS) consumption models and understand the implications of cloud service providers’ shared-responsibility model. Businesses are learning that when it comes to their data and applications, shared responsibility means sole responsibility. After all, they will be the ones out of business if their data and apps are lost, not the cloud service provider.
Also Read: Three Strategies for CISOs to Show the Value of Cybersecurity Investment
This basically means that CISOs must rethink their security strategies in order to protect cloud infrastructures. They are probably dealing with a hybrid environment that includes on-premises infrastructure as well as SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS. Even if their company has a cloud-first strategy, the transition will take time. New technologies, holistic procedures, and complete governance models that enable visibility into cloud instances and assist safeguard the cloud infrastructure should be deployed by CISOs.
Switch to a zero-trust architecture (ZTA)
The concept of securing a perimeter has effectively gone the way of the ivory-billed woodpecker, and remote work is here to stay. Organizations should allow employees access to mission-critical assets regardless of where they are situated in order to maintain business continuity. Employees are most likely using personal or shared devices, as well as unprotected networks, to access these resources.
CISOs must think strategically and use zero-trust architecture to deliver borderless security. With respect to data, networks, employees, and devices, ZTA mandates that enterprises always verify and never trust. To reflect the change to ZTA, security controls and identity and access management rules should be redesigned.
To do so, CISOs need complete visibility over the enterprise’s linked devices and endpoints. They should also have up-to-date information on what data connected devices produce, who connects to company networks and from where, what they access, and if they are permitted to access it.
For more such updates follow us on Google News ITsecuritywire News
