Cybersecurity

SASE framework gains ground over legacy security controls

Software-defined wide-area network adoption is already at speed. By replacing legacy multiprotocol, label-switching, and wide area networks, the SASE framework is transforming security controls to the edge.

ZTNA becomes mainstream for secure and seamless zero-trust access

ZTNA enforces granular, adaptive, and context-aware policies, leading to secure and seamless zero-trust access to private applications hosted across clouds and corporate data centers, from any location and device.

Risk-based authentication gains prominence to minimize security risks

A strong identity helps establish robust security standards for a zero-trust model. It connects legacy and cloud applications with policies applied to manage access risks and secure attack surfaces.

Identity becomes a core component with zero-trust security model

The zero-trust model maintains that all users or devices, irrespective of their access location, are authenticated and authorized to access requested applications or services.

Enhanced security at all touchpoints with integrated data protection and classification tools

Data loss prevention (DLP) tools protect data onpremises on endpoints (when in use), during transit (network) or at rest (on storage). DLP can be integrated with a CASB to ensure the same DLP policies are applied to cloud-hosted data. User entity behavior analysis (UEBA) capabilities in CASB can be used to provide role-based access control to applications or cloud-hosted data and detect suspicious user access activity.

Certificate life cycle management and automation gain consideration

With increasing cloud adoption and remote connections, the number of certificates in the environment has gone up drastically. In the transition phase, a valid certificate for secure communication became essential. Generally, enterprise-level certificates will have two years of expiry. In recent times, where most companies have completed two years of cloud adoption, we have seen many application downtime issues because of expired certificates.

Supply chain security and vendor risk management (VRM) gain focus

As organizations increasingly collaborate with partners and outsource work, the risk of compromise also increases in the supply chain. VRM identifies a business’ vendor relationships and associated cyber risks. The tool categorizes risks from vendors and helps track and mitigate those risks. VRM also tests potential suppliers before they are approved as vendors.

New cyber controls enable effective cybersecurity governance

With evolving cyber threats, CISOs struggle to measure and track the effectiveness of their control measures. Transaction systems such as SIEMs provide only a snapshot of their status and include excessive data for a strategic review. Using GRC automation tools for cyber metrics management is a long and expensive process.

SBD adoption embeds security early and ensures digital trust

SBD identifies and verifies security requirements during the build and test phases before go-live. Similarly, privacy regulations, such as GDPR, mandate PbD, ensuring the consent is captured and managed via data collection. The personally identifiable information must be secured while in use and destroyed when no longer needed.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) on cloud adoption emphasizes business-critical ERP application security

With ERP solutions now exposed to the cloud, hacker activities have significantly increased. While ERP vendors have native solutions, there are niche solutions from vendors such as Onapsis that provide end-to-end protection of business-critical ERP solutions.

Ticketless infrastructure VM minimizes manual efforts

Infrastructure vulnerabilities are identified using automated scanning tools in real time. Post-identification, the critical step is to prioritize and remediate the vulnerabilities. The tracking and assignment of these vulnerabilities were done manually using spreadsheets until the recent past.

Orchestration, automation, and response technology ease incident management

Incident management has traditionally been executed with defined standard operating procedures or playbooks. However, security analysts who were given these playbooks during an investigation provided inconsistent outcomes and delayed responses.

Advanced security monitoring through cloud-specific protection programs

As organizations move their data to the cloud, security becomes vulnerable. CASB solutions can help by shadowing data and IT.

IoT and OT tools enable complete network visibility

Enterprises were finding it difficult to track and manage their critical infrastructure due to the distributed nature of assets. However, increasing attacks necessitated the demand for monitoring operational and security events and implementing a proper incident management program. Organizations mainly required visibility on IoT and OT assets, traffic, and associated risks.

Real-time security monitors help detect vulnerabilities and violations in 5G

The evolution of 5G opens opportunities for emerging technologies such as IoT-based smart meters, connected cars, augmented and virtual reality, and telemedicine with lower latency, higher capacity, low energy, high throughput, and increased bandwidth capabilities. But 5G infrastructure virtualization, network resource sharing, dynamic network topologies, and slicing introduce novel security challenges such as isolation flaws in 5G infrastructure virtualization.

Secure landing zones gain prominence for cyber resilience and security as a built-in culture

Enterprises are increasingly adopting public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). However, distributed models of these cloud environments have become a newer security issue for enterprises. Multiple accounts or subscriptions are created based on departments (e.g., marketing, sales, HR, IT) or criticality (e.g., production, nonproduction, sandbox, test).

Cloud security as code ensures continuous compliance in production

A wide range of security solutions is natively available from cloud service and cloud security-focused providers. However, these providers need to employ the latest advancements and strengthen the implementation framework to empower developers to use cloud services without compromising security controls.

Integrated frameworks and privacy technologies enable effective data protection

Automated privacy assessments use privacy-enabled technologies to efficiently assess cloud, IoT, OT, AI, big data, and surveillance systems. Organizations should establish a PbD policy to embed privacy throughout the life cycles of technologies, from the early design stage through deployment, use, and ultimate disposal or disposition.