International. Leaders in security and risk management must address eight major trends to enable rapid reinvention in their organization, as COVID-19 accelerates digital business transformation and challenges traditional cybersecurity practices, according to Gartner, Inc.
In the keynote address at the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit held virtually in March, Peter Firstbrook, research vice president at Gartner, said these trends are a response to the persistent global challenges that all organizations are experiencing.
"The first challenge is a skills gap. 80% of organizations tell us they have difficulty finding and hiring security professionals and 71% say it is affecting their ability to deliver security projects within their organizations," said Mr. Firstbrook.
Other key challenges facing security and risk leaders in 2021 include the complex geopolitical situation and growing global regulations, the migration of workspaces and workloads away from traditional networks, an explosion in diversity and endpoint locations, and a changing attack environment, in particular, ransomware challenges. and business email engagement.
The following major trends represent business, market and technology dynamics that are expected to have a broad impact on the industry and significant potential for disruption.
Top Gartner Security and Risk Management Trends, 2021
Trend 1: Cybersecurity mesh
Cybersecurity mesh is a modern security approach that involves implementing controls where they are needed most. Instead of all security tools running in one silo, a cybersecurity mesh allows the tools to interoperate by providing fundamental security services and centralized policy management and orchestration. With many IT assets now outside of traditional enterprise perimeters, a cybersecurity mesh architecture allows organizations to extend security controls to distributed assets.
Trend 2: Identity Security
For many years, the vision of access for any user, anytime and from anywhere (often referred to as "identity as the new security perimeter") was ideal. It has now become a reality due to technical and cultural changes, along with a remote workforce now in the majority during COVID-19. Identity-first security puts identity at the center of security design and demands a major shift from traditional LAN edge design thinking.
"The SolarWinds attack showed that we are not doing a great job of managing and monitoring identities. While a lot of money and time has been invested in multi-factor authentication, single sign-on, and biometric authentication, very little has been invested in effective authentication monitoring to detect attacks against this infrastructure," said Mr. Firstbrook.
Trend 3: Security support for remote work is here to stay
According to Gartner's CIO Agenda 2021 Survey, 64% of employees can now work from home. Gartner surveys indicate that at least 30-40% will continue to work from home after COVID-19. For many organizations, this change requires a full reset of security policies and tools suitable for the modern remote workspace. For example, endpoint protection services will need to be moved to services provided in the cloud. Security leaders should also review data protection, disaster recovery, and backup policies to make sure they still work for a remote environment.
Trend 4: Cyber Board of Directors
In the 2021 Gartner Board of Directors Survey, ceos rated cybersecurity as the second highest source of risk to the enterprise after regulatory compliance. Large companies are now beginning to create a dedicated cybersecurity committee at the board level, led by a board member with security expertise or an outside consultant.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, 40% of boards will have a dedicated cybersecurity committee overseen by a qualified board member, compared to less than 10% today.
Trend 5: Consolidation of security vendors
Gartner's 2020 CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) Effectiveness Survey found that 78% of CISOs have 16 or more tools in their portfolio of cybersecurity vendors; 12% are 46 or older. The large number of security products in organizations increases complexity, integration costs, and staffing requirements. In a recent Gartner survey, 80% of IT organizations said they plan to consolidate vendors in the next three years.
"CISOs are eager to consolidate the number of security products and vendors they must deal with," Mr. Firstbrook said. "Having fewer security solutions can make it easier to properly configure and respond to alerts, improving your security risk posture. However, buying a broader platform can have drawbacks in terms of cost and implementation time. We recommend focusing on TCO over time as a measure of success."
Trend 6: Computing that improves privacy
Privacy-enhancing computing techniques are emerging that protect data while it is being used, rather than when it is at rest or in motion, to enable the safe processing, sharing, and reproduction of data.
Ss-border transfers and analytics, even in untrusted environments. Implementations are increasing in fraud analytics, intelligence, data sharing, financial services (e.g., anti-money laundering), pharmaceuticals, and healthcare.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, 50% of large organizations will adopt privacy-enhancing computing to process data in untrusted environments or multi-party data analytics use cases.
Trend 7: Simulation of breaches and attacks
Attack and breach simulation (BAS) tools are emerging to provide ongoing defensive posture assessments, challenging the limited visibility provided by annual point assessments such as penetration testing. When CISOs include BAS as part of their regular security assessments, they can help their teams identify gaps in their security posture more effectively and prioritize security initiatives more efficiently.
Trend 8: Machine Identity Management
Machine identity management aims to establish and manage trust in the identity of a machine that interacts with other entities, such as devices, applications, cloud services, or gateways. There are now a greater number of non-human entities present in organizations, which means that machine identity management has become a vital part of security strategy.
Source: Gartner.
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