Cybersecurity Trends to Watch out for in 2021

2020 has been the year of disruption. Although many are used to high levels of constant change, COVID-19 has changed the world in ways that no-one could ever have predicted. As result, many organisations have had to pivot, re-strategise, adapt and change.

Organisations should be robust enough to withstand all kinds of disruptions and changes, whether they are natural disasters or technological ones. New trends and technological evolution will shape cybersecurity in 2021 and embracing new cybersecurity trends well in advance can help organisations gain strategic advantage and a competitive advantage.

Some of the key cybersecurity trends to watch out for in 2021 include:

The distribution of the cloud

Gartner has named distributed cloud as the future of cloud, and organisations who are reluctant to migrating to the public cloud often use a combination, or hybrid, of private cloud and public cloud computing. Organisations retains the responsibility for their private cloud environment, but they cannot leverage the full spectrum of capabilities offered by the public cloud provider.

However, distributed cloud provides public cloud options to different physical locations. The public cloud company maintains, operates, and evolves the services but physically executes them at the point of need. It helps with low-latency scenarios, reduces data costs and helps to accommodate privacy laws and regulations such as GDPR.

Location-orientated operations

As working from home is likely to be around for a long time to come, organisations are looking for models to help support their operations from anywhere and at any time. Location-orientated operations should therefore be designed to support clients or customers anywhere, enable employees to work from anywhere and be designed to manage the deployment of business services across distributed infrastructures.

Adopting this operating model allows for a business to be accessed, delivered, and enabled anywhere. To offer some more unique value and seamless, scalable digital experiences, businesses should invest in their technology infrastructure and their security and governance policies.

The management of endpoints

Managing endpoints is important, as they can be the entry point to corporate networks for cybercriminals.

Deploying an endpoint management solution provides great benefits to organisations, as it can protect remote workforces, manage endpoint environments, automate provisioning and compliance, and support endpoint troubleshooting.

Zero Trust cybersecurity

Multiple cloud environments and agile processes means that many corporate assets exist outside of a traditional security perimeter.

This needs to be clearly defined around the identity of the person or device requesting access with strong and effective authentication and authorisation enabling a granular and responsive security approach. By centralising policy orchestration and distributing policy enforcement, zero trust security is not a set of technologies, but rather a culture that security must evolve to meet an organisations current needs.

AI should be more responsible

With artificial intelligence (AI) evolving rapidly as a very powerful technology with limitless application, it also comes with great responsibility.

AI raises many concerns due to the potential for disruption that it has. These legitimate concerns include workforce displacement, biases in decision making, lack of control over automated systems and robots and loss of privacy. Responsible AI therefore focuses on ensuring that the transparent, ethical, and accountable use of AI technologies in a manner consistent with user expectations, organisational values, and a societies law.

Final thoughts

A common them for all trends that are likely to emerge in 2021 in cybersecurity is “identity”. It is difficult to safeguard your value, reputation, and business assets if you don’t enforce the protection of identities. Protecting the digital identities of individuals and devices/services is critical to ensure a robust corporate cyber security posture.

To improve their cybersecurity, organisations need to ensure that not only is their data well protected, but also that their staff are fully trained against the growing cyber threat. At CyBourn, we have a range of services that can help, giving you full peace of mind when it comes to your cybersecurity posture. Talk to us today to find out more.