The path to cyber security 2030

• Frost & Sullivan says that over the next 8 years, the earth will have a complex network of 200 billion devices, averaging over 20 connected devices per human.
  
• As the IoT connected devices become more sophisticated in their capabilities, their vulnerability to breaches will rise too.
  
• Leadership and stakeholders need to understand the imperative of budgeting for higher spending on cyber security – mere software solutions will not be enough.
  

Cyber security has been the bane of chief information security officers (CISOs), indeed of companies, since the advent of IT. But never has it been more critical for survival than during the last two years - as the pandemic forced teams into remote working. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021 reports a 6-fold increase in the number of cyber crimes during the pandemic. Over the two years of the pandemic, the cost of a data breach increased from $3.89 million to $4.96 million. With at least half the employees working remotely, it took an additional 58 days to identify and contain a cyber-security breach. The costs of keeping a company secure are increasing dramatically as well – $433 billion is the projected collective global cybersecurity spending by 2030.

Interestingly, there seems to be no real water-tight solution for ensuring zero cyber-security risk, but security leaders keep developing smarter and sharper tools to minimise the attacks and risk. The risk is the biggest issue – in terms of data loss, as well as privacy breaches – both for customers and the company.

Risks moving forward

Ironically, it is the greater adoption of technology that will be causing an increase in cyber attacks. And interestingly, these new technologies are expected to find the roadmap for higher security as well. The next decade – with ubiquitous connectivity, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and next-generation approaches to security management, could continue to pose challenges for security.

• AI is the case in point here since it allows the complete democratisation of cybercrime. On the other hand, it also helps to detect and do predictive identification of cyber attacks as well. Similarly, Internet of Things (IoT) environments provide very susceptible spaces for sabotage and extortion attacks on the supply chain, logistics, transportation, manufacturing and healthcare sectors, to name just a few. Frost & Sullivan reports that over the next 8 years, the earth will have a complex network of 200 billion devices, averaging over 20 connected devices per human. As the IoT connected devices become more sophisticated in their capabilities, their vulnerability to breaches will rise too.
  
• On the networking front, as 5G becomes commonplace and 6G starts to take root, data privacy will become a huge concern, since an increased amount of data transfer would certainly lay bare the nodes to greater and more expensive attacks. This ubiquitous connectivity is creating a shared infrastructure of services, cloud, ISPs, software, databases and supply chain. In a bid to increase accessibility, resilience and agility, organisations are inadvertently putting a much larger portion of their infrastructure at risk from cyber attacks, which in turn would lead to much higher costs and much more severe impacts.
  
• As digital identity becomes commonplace, it raises the risk of exposure to all sorts of data. This is a calculated risk that enterprises need to take.
  
• As software-as-a-service (SaaS) and everything-as-a-service become more commonplace, cloud providers risk becoming sitting ducks for cyber attacks and this will only become more vicious over the next few years or so.
  
• Increasing hostilities and power play between developed nations is also driving huge Dark web activities – data attacks, stolen data and sold at ransom figures going into billions are being regularly sponsored by states.
  
• The Metaverse is now poised to be our second world, blurring the lines between reality and virtuality. The users and interface need to feed much more information on the platform, attracting greater interest from attackers than ever. Security there will need to be very astute – it will have to keep data secure without compromising on its functionality or convenience.
  

Bridging the gaps

Traditional ways of cyber security do not stand a chance against the new age cyber attacks. Mitigation and response need to transform, but the enterprise environment has not yet realised this. Quelling future problems with solutions of the past has never worked, but organisational inertia could steep companies in these challenges for some time to come.

So what’s the way forward? Skills are running in short supply, so the first step would be to equip security professionals with modern tools to fight modern threats. Leadership and stakeholders need to understand the imperative of budgeting for higher spending on cyber security – mere software solutions will not be enough. Investments will need to be made in research and knowledge support, and there is a need for stronger government policy and regulation.

Threat actors will continue with their game of sniffing out opportunities and vulnerabilities over the next few years as well. As newer tools are adopted, newer vulnerabilities will be identified, newer attacks will happen.

Dell Technologies recently teamed up with the Institute for the Future (IFTF) and 20 experts from around the world to work on REALIZING 2030 - a project to understand the future and forecast how today’s newer technologies will impact human life in the next ten years. It finds interesting points we need to be careful about. Using technology pragmatically will be one important point.

Enterprises will also need to dramatically increase their adoption of cyber-security culture to minimise insider threats and zero-day attacks. Cyber security will need to be built into products and services, passwords will need to go since they pose a big threat of access loss. Biometric identification could be the best way forward. AI will play a huge role in identifying as well as mitigating risks. Hopefully, over the next few years, enterprises will be able to leverage computer security algorithms to help create security fighter bots that will pre-empt, predict and identify vulnerabilities.

With the increasing number of devices, data security is only going to be at greater risk and the growing digital identity culture will certainly create more active ID threats.

The balance between technological advancement and risks has to be carefully weighed in the coming years. Otherwise, the enterprise will have entered a digital ecosystem that will be an emerging behemoth with an even greater risk landscape. It will be up to security leadership to identify new roadmaps and ensure cyber risks do not grow in tandem with technological advancements.

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