With the changes brought by COVID-19, many businesses had to adapt ‘new normal’ operations and embrace virtual transactions. The shift to remote work and the expansion of online markets have emphasized the need for companies to improve their information technology (IT) infrastructure.
However, the pandemic-driven IT infrastructures are often built hastily. And the abrupt evolution of business processes may not be that strategic. Consequently, cybersecurity controls might have been recklessly looked over.
As technology saturates every industry, the risks of cybercrimes also increase. Businesses must review and address their technology infrastructure and cybersecurity measures after the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a post-pandemic world, here are some cybersecurity trends you will be expecting:
1. Rapid Adoption of Cloud Infrastructure
The pandemic has highlighted factors such as high availability, disaster recovery, lower costs for backup and remote workforce management, and business agility. Businesses want to be resilient and flexible to survive.
Thus, businesses are migrating more essential services and applications to the public cloud. It reduces their reliance on on-premises data centers and enables companies to work remotely. If you consider migrating to clouds, you can consult IT companies specifically in your area, such as cybersecurity services in Denver.
However, most businesses migrate quickly to the cloud without synchronizing all their data. Every office has its own set of computing environments, resulting in a heterogeneous infrastructure. Having a different environment in one organization requires a mixture of different security policies. Cybercriminals can see right through these gaps and data silos and create an even larger hole for exploiting your data.
Moreover, the sudden adoption of cloud infrastructure may have left a misunderstanding on cloud’s real security. Executives may have pre-supposed that once their data are in the cloud then, they are already safe. This thinking did not take into account cybersecurity controls such as who will safeguard the information and what information should be restricted.
Fortunately, these vulnerabilities can be patched in the cloud-based network faster than off-premise computing. You can constantly update your security across all the devices connected to the cloud. In this way, all upgrades are installed instantly across the entire network and end-devices, leaving no gaps for adversaries to exploit.
2. Strengthening of Cyber Immunity Through Decentralization
The traditional approach to cybersecurity has been to prevent breaches and respond to security incidents. Neither of these approaches provides immunity against cyberattacks, or more precisely, protection of critical assets from compromises and hacking. It is where the distributed approach comes in.
Although not a new concept, a decentralized technique describes a scenario in which a critical application or service is divided among devices or nodes in a distributed network. In this way, you don’t need a centralized server.
For example, the decentralized approach divides the data into multiple parts, making reconstruction almost impossible. Because cybercriminals do not have access to the entire range of data, the data remain unaffected by all attacks.
In a post-pandemic world, where working remotely is ideal, you can expect security controls to be offloaded to remote workers through endpoint firewalls. Moreover, data protection and digital rights management can be distributed among employees.
3. Leveraging With Emerging Technologies
Cybercriminals are using emerging technologies to automate their attacks. That’s why defending against their threats necessitates those businesses must understand how to effectively deploy emerging technologies as new solutions.
Here are some examples of emerging technologies and their integration into cybersecurity:
- Ubiquitous Interconnectivity
Greater coherence and consistency of policies are needed to improve security. And with ubiquitous interconnectivity, a cyber analyst can openly share intelligence on attacks and solutions. Also, they can instantly identify a suspicious file and hand it over to someone who handled such attacks before. Collaboration improves an organization’s ability to respond to attacks.
- Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to automate security processes such as security alert responses. It can rapidly analyze large data sets and identify cyber threats ranging from malicious malware to dubious human transactions.
- Quantum Computing
Quantum computing is a technology based on quantum mechanics, the theory that governs how nature works at a subatomic level. It can leverage cybersecurity by allowing the generation of truly random numbers for cryptography and the exchange of encryption keys in utmost secrecy.
- Digital Identification Technology
A digital ID technology enables the evaluation and authentication of a user interacting with a business system on the internet. If managed properly, digital identity could constitute an essential part of the data security solution. For example, a digital ID with a biometric component ensures strong authentication and reduces the risk of AI-based impersonation.
Tangled Trends
At present, technology solutions are becoming more intelligent, more flexible, and more pervasive. Business operations and processes are rapidly becoming reliant on these technologies. Simultaneously, data security and privacy vulnerabilities are increasing due to rapid changes in the technology world.
The post-pandemic world is an entanglement of devices across different networks. These interdependencies among customers and enterprises propel the development of a mechanism for ensuring trustworthy and reliable organizational cybersecurity.
