Data Security Predictions 2021

Zero Trust, vishing and strategic approaches to a chaotic, rapidly evolving world.

Security Predictions and Survival Strategies for 2021

Amazingly, the Job Got Harder

2020 was a year of unprecedented challenge for IT security teams.

Consider where they started: Technology is changing quickly, and an organization’s attack surface is constantly morphing. They have tools for detecting anomalies — and detect so many that they’re overwhelmed. And attack vectors constantly change as adversaries, driven by greed, political agendas or the lulz, come up with new tricks.

Now add coronavirus: Shut down your entire business. Or maybe just certain offices in certain regions in a sort of cascading business brownout. Have any number of workers logging in on personal devices. Have them overwhelm your existing digital collaboration tools, maybe adopting new, unvetted workarounds on the fly. Consider that the biggest security risk is a human who fails to spot, say, an email that is not normal (or legitimate). And consider that since early March, there’s been no functional definition of normal.

Marinate in that until late 2021, at best.

As we’ve seen across the IT organization, the massive disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation across the board. That means new technologies, new processes, adopted at a faster rate than ever, among greater disorder and organizational stress. In addition, remote work has invalidated corporate network protections to a great extent. That, says Splunk CISO Yassir Abousselham, puts incredible pressure on security teams.

“We have to deliver the same level of security protection to employees and contingent workforce regardless of location: office, home, a coffee shop hotspot,” he says.

It’s a tall order, and Abousselham says that the challenge will drive CISOs to focus their attention on endpoint protection, and a specific security model: zero trust.

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