Trends in 2022 to address cybersecurity challenges - Vinay Sharma, Regional Director, India & SAARC, NETSCOUT

Remote working culture and BYOD approaches in the modern workplace ensured business continuity in the pandemic era and continues to do so. To facilitate this mode of work in the new business model, organisations had to adopt Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud services. This large-scale and rapid modification unfortunately created cybersecurity lapses that were temporarily overlooked.  Vulnerabilities increased and the security perimeters expanded fast and were no more contained within the four walls of the physical office infrastructure. Cyber criminals are also leveraging mobile hotspots in addition to targeting compromised IoT devoices.

Surge in the use of mobile devices, digital networks, work from remote locations, internet usage and the expanding threat surface, has brought about unprecedented data breaches and high security risks.

The C-Suite and the IT Security leaders are today concerned about the complexity, resilience, volume and frequency of the cyber-attacks. The implementation of a robust Cybersecurity strategy will support in mitigating risks to a large extent and ensure business continuity.

Some trends in 2022 will address the cyber security challenges in addition to providing a better picture of the threat landscape.

Establishing of Cybersecurity Culture

Organisations are now aware of the importance of proactively building cybersecurity into the enterprise architecture rather than doing it as an afterthought. Businesses are more likely to integrate both security and business continuity planning into the Corporate Culture.

Along with this, the people aspect is taken into consideration too. Employees across all levels and Business Units will be provided with ongoing training on cyber-threats and how to effectively address them when they occur. The role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) will include greater accountability across the business and become more strategic. A better collaboration between the network and security teams will be established to gain better clarity, operational efficiencies in addition to reduction in costs and overall risks.

Convergence of network and security at any ‘edge’

Unlike the past, today, digital transformation, remote working from any location, any device and the proliferation of IoT devices are driving the redesigning of networks.  This change in businesses is aimed to deliver enhanced user experience for both customers as well as employees. 

Furthermore, security requirements exist across all edges – the data centre, remote working environment, cloud and the networks, both WAN and LAN.  The flexible networks formed by changing applications, bandwidth and other factors have to be all the more secure.  It is imperative to have a security-driven networking strategy that converges network and security across the entire connected landscape, in addition to building the security into the core infrastructure.

SASE (Security Access Service Edge) Solutions that unify network and network security into a single cloud service delivering both connectivity and device security at the edge will be leveraged more.

Collaborative efforts against modern ransomware

One of the most cyber-threats in 2021, ransomware attacks caused severe damage across industries, both large and small. Large organisations were targeted by cyber-criminals to extract huge payouts and Ransom-as-a-Service groups attacked the small and medium businesses with no organisation spared. Ransomware will become more targeted with extortion tactics used by cyber-thieves getting more complex, going forward.  Cloud will be targeted more, as more organisations are migrating to cloud.

It is important for concerned action be taken again these attacks. It will largely help if businesses, government, security vendors and industry bodies work together to mitigate these attacks.  One of the measures could be the Know Your Customer (KYC) transparency rule, which could include cryptocurrency transactions and become more powerful. Such efforts should be led by enterprises to succeed in curtailing the ransomware spread.

Ensure the cyber-security strategy is future-proof

With remote-working culture to stay, there will be further convergence of personal and employer applications and data on the same home network and the same devices. IT Security teams will have to work at efficient ways of segmenting the two domains. There will be dedicated resources to address the segmentation and micro-segmentation of all stakeholders in the applications and data that are run on personal devices.

Cybersecurity best practices will be put in place, where some security solutions will have automated scans for functions such as, misconfigurations and regulatory compliance, relieving the teams from manual managing such time-consuming, repetitive tasks.

Zero-Trust approach will ensure that the device or user attempting to connect to the business applications or systems will be thoroughly investigated and permission provided only after confirmation. The approach also provides continuous monitoring for suspicious activity across the infrastructure and ensures that a secure environment is maintained.

It is important to have clear and actionable visibility into the hybrid cloud environments, to establish business continuity, risk mitigation, employee productivity, innovation and remote work management, all factors, which are driving the organisation’s business objectives. Any visibility blind spot will abruptly stop the smooth flow of business services. An ongoing 24X7X365 proactive visibility will provide, triaging of services, extracting critical insights from the data and fixing SaaS application performance. Besides monitoring it should deliver alerts, analysis of incidents and troubleshooting for better hybrid cloud management.