As the number of cyber attacks continues to grow and privacy regulations such as GDPR take effect, it’s clear that security is pushing its way to the forefront of business priorities.
However, simply dumping money into a complex cybersecurity problem isn’t going to protect customer data, segment user access or secure remote connections to the network. Instead, businesses will need to invest in a cybersecurity solution that works for them.
While simple tips such as encrypting data, changing the default passwords on server infrastructure and monitoring network traffic and server usage can help secure your business’ private data, these CISOs explained what trends and innovations they’re most excited about seeing in the InfoSec industry this year.
While the new year introduces endless predictions for the next popular product, service and technology, one trend many CISOs are hopeful to see is an increase in talent availability.
Information security is only becoming more complex which is why we need more professionals actively seeking to fill this talent gap.
“At the heart of the challenge is the small number of people with a cybersecurity skillset. We need to find ways to leverage a small population of qualified practitioners while at the same time finding ways to develop new security and risk professionals with a mindset of fundamental best practices.
My focus and evangelical mission this year is helping organizations address the fundamentals (setting the stage for taking on the shiny and exciting technical innovations) and finding ways to leverage existing experts and building and fostering new talent.” – Christopher Gerg, Vice President of Risk Management at Gillware
As new cloud applications and services are being introduced all the time, many global enterprises are welcoming more advanced security solutions such as zero trust.
“The zero trust model eliminates the idea that internal players are trustworthy individuals who mean no harm. Zero trust security continuously evaluates an individual’s behavior and actions to identify and eliminate potential threats. This is accomplished by defining parameters of legitimacy via a range of factors that determines the validity of a user’s behavior in the form of a risk score.
These determining factors may include a user’s physical location, IP address, and permissions, among many others.” – Aaron Walker, Senior Research Analyst at G2Crowd.com
Application layer attacks are expected to increase this year, which is why emerging application security tools such as Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) and Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) are necessary to protect custom code, open source libraries and frameworks.
“We are seeing a wholesale shift from legacy perimeter defenses and vulnerability scanning to instrumentation-based defenses that run as part of the thing being defended.
This is true at every layer of the stack, where we can protect individual workloads by integrating security vulnerability detection and attack prevention directly into each layer. IAST and RASP are the most disruptive here, integrating security directly into custom code applications.” – Jeff Williams, Co-Founder and CTO of Contrast Security
While Artificial Intelligence is a trending topic, many of these information security tools remain overcomplicated. In some cases, AI and Machine Learning can be useful as strong detection and prevention tools, but industry-wide, the implementation of these pattern recognition technologies can be troublesome.
“CIOs are realizing that through improper implementation of such disruptive technologies, security weaknesses have been built inside of their organizations. In order for these advanced systems to benefit enterprises, establishing clear requirements and investing in the education of the technology is integral for proficient deployment.
We should expect to see CIOs adopting platforms that allows developers to store info with your own security models and is more applicable to the needs of the future.” – Lawrence Flynn, CEO of Artificial Solutions
However, AI systems and machine learning are able to effectively learn from user behavior and apply adaptive controls which can automatically detect known threats before they cause significant harm. “Machine learning is a large experimentation process.
Right now, however, most companies are failing to capture information on the vast majority of their experiments and failing to provide their researchers with the tools they need to efficiently develop cutting-edge models. We’re also going to see a shift from simple, end-to-end tools to custom, best-in-class machine learning platforms as people begin to realize the value of specialization.
A leading indicator of this trend will be the rise of new jobs around product management for ML platforms. As specialization occurs, more advanced methods of machine learning like deep learning and reinforcement learning will gain traction.” – Scott Clark, CEO and Co-Founder of SigOpt
Workflow automation is expected to increase within SOC organizations this year. “CISO’s will start to explore tech solutions paired with process and procedure to offset the amount of skilled engineers to combat cyber threats.
Tooling implemented will not only be focused around workflow, but also machine learning capabilities to identify patterns and behaviors that can drive automation to remediate threats.
As enterprises increase in devices, networks, and identities, organizations will need to implement tech to increase awareness driving automated solutions to keep networks secure.” – Ray McKenzie, Founder and Managing Director at Red Beach Advisors
One of the primary challenges in DevOps is overcoming the “separation of concerns” that exists by providing DevOps teams with a collaborative environment that can be accessed securely without restricting the agility of development and operations.
“In 2019, more companies will begin to prioritize DevOps as the focus of their agile strategy. As nearly every company is shifting their business model towards software in some capacity, those that will be successful will recognize that their ability to be agile can only be accomplished if they are automating as much of their pipeline as possible..” – Alex Salazar, Vice President of Product Strategy at Okta
“Services like Megaport and Masergy will increase the ability for InfoSec teams to monitor, control and adapt their networks to mitigate threats. Instead of having to support MPLS, Dark Fiber and ISP, SDWan will pull the networking experience under one roof and allow for greater flexibility and integration which will enable better security.” – Drew Farnsworth, Partner at Green Lane Design
As companies continue to shift to the cloud, we’ll see more businesses who fail to configure their cloud environments correctly. “One of the first strategies companies attempt for cloud migration is named “lift and shift,” which simply takes an application and migrates it up to the cloud provider. This often unintentionally exposes the applications to more users, where the internal application from several years ago with limited maintenance is now available up in the cloud.
With cloud migrations, I see a level of bill hijacking, where hackers attempt to run their services in other companies’ accounts. When you look at crypto-mining and bustable cloud resources, it’s perfect: the hacker gets the coins and the victim pays for the resources.
The cloud always has more resources for sale.” – Erik Costlow, Principal Product Evangelist at Contrast Security
While businesses move to the cloud, in-house IT services and localized networks are becoming a thing of the past. “Managed security services, where someone is always on and watching your system against threats, is becoming more the rule than the exception.
There are nearly a million pieces of malware released per day, and that’s even including more specialized attacks like DDos. The number of threats isn’t going to diminish anytime soon. Being prepared is the only solution.” – Adnan Raja, Vice President of Marketing for Atlantic.Net
While many organizations rely on dated, hardware-based VPN technology, these systems are complex, costly and require extensive management. The Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) model addresses traditional VPN limitations while providing a flexible cloud-based platform, granular user-access control and analytics, and segmented access to on-premise and cloud resources.
More advantages of SDP technology include the ability to:
