Barracuda Networks, a trusted partner and a leading
provider of cloud-enabled security solutions, revealed predictions that will
shape the future of enterprise security in the coming year. It indicated that
the threats of today will continue to target the weakest link in the chain,
which normally is the human element. Year 2021 will witness many of the
key trends in 2020 to continue.
1-Distributed
enterprises and remote workers
Considering that in a span
of a few weeks, companies went from 10% of workers being remote to over 90% of
workers moving to remote, by 2021 we will see many of them slowly bringing back
some key workers to their facilities and adopting measures that will give their
employees flexibility if they can maintain productivity. While many companies
had some experience of setting up temporary and limited remote access for
contractors and vendors, every company will need to make sure they have clear
processes and controls for managing a large percentage of their employees
remotely for extended periods. Every company will need to have policies and
procedures for managing remote access.
2-Accelerated migration
to cloud adoption
Meanwhile, there will be an
accelerated adoption of cloud services. First, new applications are being
delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS) instead of on-premises
implementation. Second, and more importantly, existing on-premises applications
are also migrating faster to the cloud. 2020 was that inflection point for many
with the cloud. COVID-19 forced many companies to significantly accelerate
their migration to cloud services to address shutdowns and remote workers. IT
executives will need to understand whether and how the assets and services
delivered in the public cloud are adhering to compliance regimes as more and
more capabilities are now delivered as cloud services.
In addition, as more and more companies are exposed
to threats that impact the privacy of their customers or enterprises, the risk
of breaches will require IT security executives to be able to effectively
communicate and execute plans that encourage and require other teams to enforce
compliance.
3-Shortage of key
resources to help mitigate growing security issues that will take advantages of
the new reality
There
will be a continued shortage of cybersecurity talent to help
mitigate security issues, despite the recession and COVID-19 job losses.
Attacks will also increase to take advantage of the new reality like distracted
workers, global pandemic, cost pressures from the recession, remote access,
accelerated adoption of cloud services. Each of these alone would be cause for
concern for cybersecurity professionals. All these macro trends happening
simultaneously demands the highest level of vigilance against those who would
take advantage of these situations.
However,
security executives will need to achieve the same level of security or more
with tighter budgets due to the economic recession. There will be a growing
need for security executives to get fully comfortable with novel cloud-centric
security architecture. Additionally, 5G adoption will start to get more
tangible in many regions of the world. IT security executives will need to come
up with a more holistic understanding of risk and adequate protection measures
as it pertains to the entire corporate network, including OT and industrial IoT
environments
4-Zero
Trust Network Access solutions are the way forward for enterprises to keep
risks at bay
The COVID-19 pandemic has
transformed work habits, which means corporate endpoints will be predominately
used outside the perimeter of the corporate network in work-from-home
environments. This will require organizations to review their current endpoint security
and compliance enforcement approaches. As more consumers and businesses are
becoming aware of the data breaches, there will be increasing discussion about
the role of trust in security. While the concepts like Zero Trust and
micro-segmentation are emerging as ideal ways to decrease attack surfaces,
these solutions will be part of a broader approach that will leverage social
graphs and machine learning to identify issues and enforce trust relationships.
Emerging Security Technologies in 2021
There is no reason to
believe the threats of today will not be the threats of tomorrow. There will
just be more of them, and they will be more effective and continue to see a
proliferation of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, ransomware,
business email compromise, and malware-based attacks. These attacks will be
more successful as companies deal with a series of events that have changed the
attack surface.
Considering the enterprise
security trends, it is clear that there will be a sharp increase in the demand
for cybersecurity talent next year. Solutions that move security closer to the
edge (people, places, and things) will become much more popular in 2021.
5-Classic gateway-based
solutions will be augmented by CESS solutions
In email protection,
classic gateway-based solutions will be augmented by Cloud Email Supplemental
Security (CESS) solutions that leverage API access and social graphs/artificial
intelligence/machine learning to mitigate messaging-based attacks. More such
solutions will be used to address the threats on collaboration-based tools such
as Zoom, Slack, and Teams. These platforms have become very popular tools for
collaboration and are susceptible to the same type of attacks that we see with
email.
6-SD-WAN solutions have
become more prevalent
Secure Software-Defined
Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) solutions have become more prevalent. As public
cloud adoption increases, many companies have started to leverage Azure,
Google, and Amazon backbones as a delivery vehicle for their own WAN. This
makes sense as more applications and services are delivered on these cloud
services and their points of presence continue to expand worldwide.
7-Zero Trust is the new
standard in secure remote access
With remote workers and
cloud-delivered services becoming a de facto part of every business, solutions
that manage access at the highest level of granularity with the least level of
complexity to setup and manage, will become more popular in 2021. Trust-based
solutions that implement Zero Trust and other trust-based solutions will be
effective mechanisms to manage privileged access to services. Traditionally, customers
used complicated solutions like NAC or VPN. In 2021, we will see great adoption
of lightweight solutions that quickly and effectively manage access at the
device and individual level.
In addition, the physical world is expected to
respond to concerns about privacy and security with increased local legislation
to ensure companies are implementing and maintaining the highest level of
protocols to protect themselves. There will be a continued sharp increase in
the demand for cybersecurity talent into 2021 as every company will have to
implement measures and augment their resources to manage and monitor solutions
for addressing the COVID-19 mayhem.