Embracing the latest innovations in technology is extremely critical for businesses to grow; but as technology evolves, the cybersecurity landscape that organizations must cautiously navigate also grows. Reports suggest the annual cost of cybersecurity damage to hit $6 trillion by 2021, with hackers adopting increasingly ingenious and sophisticated ways to attack organizations and misuse their systems and data.
A Field Day for Hackers
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has only made things worse for businesses worldwide; as a majority of organizations continue to function via a remote work model (and without durable cybersecurity measures in place), hackers are having a field day! If you’re looking to cope up with the many changes that are currently happening and successfully transition to the new normal in 2021 (and beyond), here are five emerging cybersecurity technologies you must consider to safeguard your business:
1. Behavior Analytics: Given the various means by which your organization’s security can be compromised, adopting behavior analytics is a great way to examine trends, patterns, and activities among your users and applications. Because behavioral analytics analyzes daily workflows and records normal user behavior, any unusual behavior is instantly recorded and alerts are sent to the security team to investigate. This can either be a change in the device the user normally uses to access the application or service, the location from where it is accessed, time of the day, or the number of attempts he/she makes. Since a behavior baseline has already been made, it can help indicate if hackers are trying to compromise your organization and attempting to access sensitive corporate data.
2. Extended Detection and Response: As the threat landscape gets increasingly complex, SaaS-based, extended detection and response technologies can help reinforce your organization’s security posture. By collecting and correlating data across various networks, systems, applications, and endpoints, they help analyze correlated data and provide visibility and context in revealing advanced threats. Because they can improve the level of awareness, they help in reducing the severity and scope of attacks while helping prevent security breaches, system breakdowns, and data loss.
3. Artificial Intelligence: Although AI has been helping organizations in unearthing critical threat intelligence, in 2021, the technology will continue to play a huge role in enabling (and ensuring) cybersecurity. By analyzing massive quantities of data from structured and unstructured resources, AI can not only deliver accurate threat intelligence, it can also help take appropriate and timely action and prevent small issues from becoming huge problems. Since AI algorithms learn from experience, they can improve the knowledge of threats and risks as your organization grows while constantly identifying the relationships between threats and improving overall threat response.
4. Encryption and Tokenization: As regulatory requirements across PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR get increasingly stringent, data obfuscation technologies like encryption and tokenization can help secure information that is stored or transmitted on the Internet. Encryption transforms meaningful data, rendering it unreadable to unauthorized parties, whereas tokenization substitutes meaningful data elements with non-sensitive tokens which have no exploitable value. Together, these technologies can help in ensuring authorized access, satisfying compliance requirements, and protecting against accidental data loss.
5. Automation: As the shortage of skilled security personnel becomes increasingly widespread, automation can help overcome complex compliance requirements, the incessant evolution of cyberattacks, and perilous insider threats. Since automation automates the handling of security-related tasks across vulnerability scanning, threat analysis, and risk remediation – without human intervention, it can help eliminate manual, time-intensive processes that take up your team’s time while accelerating time to resolution and optimizing ROI of security investments.
Enterprise Systems Under Pressure
Coping with the pressure to protect enterprise systems and data requires organizations have to take security very seriously: this means not trusting anything, outside or inside, their perimeter and verifying every user, endpoint, system, and application that is trying to access enterprise resources. Embracing a zero-trust model is the only way organizations can navigate the modern security threat landscape and ensure that data breaches that have grown in volume and complexity are dealt with in the quickest and most appropriate manner.
