Blog Posts

With the coming of the pandemic and upending of the world of work, software and IT have truly become enablers of organizational and business resilience. However, the growing sophistication of cyber-attack techniques is driving furious growth in the application security market.

Research shows that the global application security market will grow from “USD 2.79 billion in 2017 to USD 9.0 billion by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 26.4%.”

Some of the reasons articulated for this have been a shift in the attacks from the network layer to the application layer. The maturing of technologies such as IoT and 5G complemented with the increasing digital transformation in the industrial sector in emerging economies and growing reliance on the application economy as digital transformation becomes business imperatives increase the surface areas of threats.

As enterprises and industries digitally transform, the focus will have to move towards endpoint security especially with the continuing adoption of the hybrid work environment. Safeguarding entry points or endpoints of end-user devices such as laptops, desktops, and mobiles from exploitation will continue to be important in the coming year.

Along with having robust mandatory policies to enable better access management, enterprise software development must look at baking secure software into the DNA of applications and solutions to prevent hackers from compromising endpoints.

As such infrastructure and endpoint security must become more airtight to tackle sophisticated security attacks, fileless malware, advanced attacks, and evasive threats. This becomes especially important since 80% of cyberattacks happen at endpoints. Automating patch management, staying on top of third-party patches, making cloud architectures and implementations airtight by focusing on endpoint security, and employing multi-factor authentication processes are a few of the many things that can improve the endpoint security stance.

The pandemic rushed us towards the future of work and witnessed the acceleration towards cloud migration. With time, it is clear that the world of work is not going back to its previous avatar. While the cloud became the enabler of business and organizational resilience in the face of disruption, attacks on the cloud infrastructures also grabbed attention.

Reports show that more or less 100% of organizations faced at least one data breach in 2021. Security incidents also increased by 20% between 2020 and 2021.

Misconfiguration, lack of visibility, identity, and unauthorized access remained some of the key reasons that led to data breaches and leakage. With cloud environments ever-expanding, it is becoming harder to identify misconfigurations. Reduction and complete elimination of misconfigurations, employing best practices of varied cloud configurations, making security top of the mind for SaaS and PaaS platforms even in a multi-cloud environment, checking on storage bucked, encryptions, and account permissions along with following the zero-trust model will become imperative in 2022.

It is also important to pay close attention to machine and service identities as these are being exploited in almost every cloud breach to move laterally or access data. Since these identifies are created by developers, accounting for these at the development stage and identifying, prioritizing, and automating the risk remediation associated with machine identities improve security.

While cybersecurity threats are increasing exponentially, the cybersecurity talent crunch continues to plague the industry with no signs of abating in the coming year.

Finding great security analysts, security architects, cloud security architects, threat researchers, and other similar profiles will continue to be difficult in 2022. The cybersecurity skills gap is expected to touch 1.8 million by 2022

With the increasing pace of technology change, organizations have to look at skilled professionals and develop partnerships to access specialized knowledge to design security systems and develop secure software and tools and keep their organization safe. In that light, enterprise CIOs would do well to turn to next-gen hiring platforms like MyGenie to find the top IT experts to help them fill the breach in their security talent pipeline.

2021 was a record-breaking year in data breaches. A focus on data protection in the coming year is going to remain a key consideration for enterprises. This becomes especially important since all businesses run on data. The rise of data science, BI, and analytics as enablers of good business decisions and the subsequent democratization of data to become data-driven organizations demand that zero-trust security models become a mainstay.

The adoption of zero-trust technologies increased in 2021. In 2022 adopting a zero-trust security model may well become the norm. This is primarily because enterprise data now resides on a variety of platforms and services that are both on and off-premise.

Since this data is being accessed from geographically disparate locations standard security models need to be upgraded to address the needs of today’s complex networks.

2021 was a record-breaking year in data breaches. A focus on data protection in the coming year is going to remain a key consideration for enterprises. This becomes especially important since all businesses run on data. The rise of data science, BI, and analytics as enablers of good business decisions and the subsequent democratization of data to become data-driven organizations demand that zero-trust security models become a mainstay.

The adoption of zero-trust technologies increased in 2021. In 2022 adopting a zero-trust security model may well become the norm. This is primarily because enterprise data now resides on a variety of platforms and services that are both on and off-premise.

Since this data is being accessed from geographically disparate locations standard security models need to be upgraded to address the needs of today’s complex networks.

Gearing up the security game is only prudent with all these forces at play. Taking a comprehensive security stand in 2022 will involve developing products with baked-in security, focusing on end-point security, protecting the infrastructure, and architecting cloud-based security as some critical areas to cover. Aiming to achieve compliance with security norms and elevating the security game with the right inputs from security experts can improve the security stance of enterprises.