Gartner Identifies Top Six Security and Risk Management Trends

Business leaders are becoming increasingly conscious of the impact cybersecurity can have on business outcomes. That’s according to market researcher Gartner, Inc., which has released a list of six emerging trends that can be leveraged to improve organizational resilience.

Trend No. 1: Senior executives are becoming increasingly aware of the linkage between effective cybersecurity and the achievement of business goals. This, according to Gartner, has been strengthened by a number of high profile events including the Equifax data breach, a WannaCry attack that caused worldwide damage estimated at between $1.5 to $4.0 billion, and Verizon’s recent $350 million discount on its purchase of Yahoo as a result of Yahoo’s data breach.

Trend No. 2: Legal and regulatory mandates on data protection practices are impacting digital business plans and demanding increased emphasis on data liabilities. Recent breaches have underscored the extreme business risks inherent in handling data. Moreover, the regulatory and legal environment is getting ever more complex, with Europe’s GDPR as the latest example. At the same time, the potential penalties for failing to protect data properly have increased exponentially.

Trend No. 3: Security products are rapidly exploiting cloud delivery to provide more agile solutions. Gartner says new detection technologies, activities and authentication models require vast amounts of data which is driving a rapid shift toward cloud-delivered security products more able to function in near-real time.

Trend No. 4: Machine Learning is providing value in simple tasks and elevating suspicious events for human analysis. The shift to the cloud creates opportunities to exploit ML to solve multiple security issues, such as adaptive authentication, insider threats, malware and advanced attackers.

Trend No. 5: Security purchase decisions are increasingly based on geopolitical factors. Increased levels of cyber warfare, cyber political interference, and government demands for backdoor access to software and services have resulted in new geopolitical risks in software and infrastructure buying decisions.

Trend No. 6: Dangerous concentrations of digital power are driving decentralization efforts. The Internet is driving a wave of centralization, one obvious example of which is cloud computing. While there are many benefits, a good security team should be accounting for the risks too.

Channel Impact^®
The trends provide viable guideposts for evolving security and risk management strategies for both channel partners and end customers.