Ride the Lightning

Gartner: Five Trends in Cybersecurity for 2017 and 2018

August 9, 2017

Gartner presents five trends in cybersecurity for 2017 and 2018 here.

1. It notes that folks with cybersecurity skills have a zero percent unemployment rate. The industry needs and will continue to need new kinds of skills as cybersecurity evolves in areas such as data classes and data governance. It’s a problem that security experts have avoided, but the reality is that in the next three to five years, enterprises will generate more data than they ever have before. Changes in cybersecurity will require new types of skills in data science and analytics. The general increase in information will mean artificial security intelligence is necessary. Adaptive skills will be key for the next phase of cybersecurity.
2. As the cloud environment reaches maturity, it’s becoming a security target and it will start having security problems. It’s possible cloud will fall victim to a tragedy of the commons wherein a shared cloud service becomes unstable and unsecure based on increased demands by companies. When it comes to cloud, security experts will need to decide who they can trust and who they can’t. Companies should develop security guidelines for private and public cloud use and utilize a cloud decision model to apply rigor to cloud risks.
3. The focus should shift from protection and prevention. Gartner analyst Earl Perkins says “Take the money you’re spending on prevention and begin to drive it more equitably to detection and response . . . The truth is that you won’t be able to stop every threat and you need to get over it.” A dedicated, well-financed actor who is after something in your enterprise is going to get it, even if they use the weakest link–people–to do so. This means adapting your security setup to focus on detection, response, and remediation. That’s where the cybersecurity fight is today. In the future it will most likely move to prediction of what’s coming before anything happens.
4. There is a new window of opportunity in application security, but most enterprises don’t take advantage of it because of the expense. It’s time to figure out the right way to evaluate the value of security and the best way to explain that to the business. Additionally, DevOps should become DevSecOps, with a focus on security. This is a good time to marry development and operations. The time to market has shortened so much, it creates an endless connection between development and operation, which means it’s important to stop running them as isolated units. This is the time to bring security to DevOps, or if the team is not internal, to ask the service provider what kind of security they provide.
5. Digital ecosystems drive next generation security. Safety, reliability and privacy are also a part of cybersecurity. When these systems begin to have a direct physical impact, you now become responsible for the safety of people and environments. Without a handle on security, people will die. The reliability portion is essential for operation and production environments or anyone in asset-centric firms.

They all sound like good predictions to me, but my favorite is #3. Large enterprises have woken up to shifting a large part of their focus to detection, response and remediation. Smaller enterprises? Not so much. It apparently will take some time for everyone to fully comprehend that an advanced hacker with advanced tools and sufficient funding will break through your defensive perimeters.

Hat tip to Dave Ries.

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