Prediction 3: Working from home gets smarter and safer
Security will get pushed to the edge and simplified
If 2020 has taught enterprises anything, it’s that remote working on a company-wide scale is possible. With people at the centre of everything, 2021 now offers an opportunity for businesses to chart a new way forward and ask how they can deliver work to their people.
With the increased adoption of cloud tools, we could see a reduction in the need for pricier devices with more computing power as virtualized desktops become an increasingly popular solution.
Businesses could instead provide employees with simpler, connected devices that enable employees to access the programmes and resources they need online, delivering the work to them directly – and in turn, protecting the company’s crown jewels.
This radical redesign of the way employees connect does away with the cybersecurity complications associated with BYOD – or, as it has become the norm, bring your own computer (BYOC) policies – while enforcing the segmentation of networks more efficiently and effectively.
Security will then need to be delivered via the edge, which will see solutions such as secure access service edge (SASE) being the new cybersecurity norm, thanks to its flexibility, simplicity, and the visibility it offers.
Prediction 4: The year of getting the house back in order
Blue-sky thinking will go out the window as IT teams go back to basics
While network security controls remain an important component of cloud security, an additional layer of identity and access management (IAM) governance is now needed as organizations continue to scale their cloud presence.
This year, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers observed that a single IAM misconfiguration could allow attackers to compromise an entire, massively scaled cloud environment and bypass just about every security control.
With the pandemic steering IT teams away from blue-sky thinking towards more nuts and bolts issues, 2021 will see more businesses shifting their IT focus inward to look at getting the fundamentals right and refocusing on things that are truly important, even finding ways to do the same thing for less.
Doing so will likely see existing cybersecurity teams and roles being redesigned to align with an overall emphasis on getting the house in order and building a more resilient cloud environment.
Security now needs to work at the speed of the cloud, and any organization that is slow to recognize this in 2021 will only see vulnerabilities multiply exponentially.
