Cybersecurity is an inherently competitive field. As criminals and state actors evolve their tactics, the industry and its experts must keep pace.
The year 2023 saw many twists and turns, and 2024 will be no different, but which direction is the industry going? Can it keep up with criminal trends and what proactive measures could the good guys themselves take?
Our field of industry experts has some ideas.
Michael ArmerChief Information Security Officer at RingCentral
Corporate boards prioritize cyber expertise
There is increasing pressure on Australian directors to take greater responsibility for the cyber resilience of their organisations. Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) chairman Joe Longo recently warned that he will take action against boards and directors who are not sufficiently prepared for cyber attacks. New regulations introduced earlier this year have increased the obligations of boards of directors of critical infrastructure organizations to approve their organization’s risk management program, review it periodically and report on it annually. Over the next year, corporate boards will prioritize adding members who combine cybersecurity experience with business acumen. From protecting valuable intellectual property to privacy and trust issues and reputation management, cybersecurity has become a board-level topic. While not all boards will look to include a dedicated cybersecurity expert, we will see boards collectively turn to people with the necessary security and risk expertise to provide much-needed oversight. Over the next year, we will see a shift on corporate boards where cybersecurity knowledge will become a significant part of the balance of a board’s experience.
Chris Peake, CISO and SVP of Security at Smartsheet
Security partnerships will become even more important
In the era of cloud and AI, much of a company’s IT infrastructure is no longer internal or on-premises. As a result, security has become an increasingly complicated dance. You must rely on multiple partners to keep your data and your employees safe, so be sure to choose partners you can trust.
Some specific security aspects will always be your responsibility if you are a cloud technology consumer, such as checking who you license, their assigned roles, and compliance with organizational policies. You also have to decide what data to store on the platform and who can access it. But beyond specific areas of responsibility like these, you depend on your providers to protect your data, keep services running, and help you achieve your business and technology goals.
This has become especially important with the rise of generative AI tools: you need partners who are responsible for your data when innovating and incorporating AI capabilities into their products. And partners are actively working with this technology: IBM found that 93 percent of IT executives surveyed reported they were already using or considering using AI for security operations.
It is essential to carefully evaluate suppliers and partners and make decisions based on trust. We need solutions and solution providers working together to help us ensure the security of our systems, organizations and data.
Richard Sorosina, Technical Director of ANZ Security at Qualys
Security validation becomes standard practice
Cybersecurity validation will become standard practice, focusing on evaluating security controls from the attacker’s perspective. This change will lead to increased frequency of testing to provide greater assurance of key security controls across various attack vectors and to evaluate the effectiveness of organizations’ security measures.
Additionally, this proactive approach will help assess the readiness, knowledge, and ability of the overall security operations team to maintain these cybersecurity measures. This proactive approach will allow organizations to identify and address vulnerabilities more effectively, making data-driven decisions to strengthen their security posture and adapt to developments.threats.
Lebin Cheng, Head of API Security at Imperva
2024 will be the year organizations finally wake up to the risks of APIs
In 2023, the API explosion continued. Research shows that the average company has hundreds of APIs in production, while some have more than a thousand. In 2024, organizations will accept the fact that they need to take a more proactive approach to securing their APIs.
The challenge is that many organizations do not have adequate defenses or controls in place. They don’t know where their APIs are deployed or what data they access. This exposes them to risks of magnitudes they cannot understand or even begin to quantify. In 2024, as pressure to mitigate API-related security incidents continues to grow, security leaders will look for and invest in solutions that integrate seamlessly into their existing application security technology stack. This approach will give organizations a more coordinated and unified view of automated threats targeting critical APIs and applications, many of which connect to data warehouses where enterprise data resides. In the coming years, this will force a new era of convergence in the security industry, where API management and security will be integrated into application security platforms.
Craig Batesvice president of Australia and New Zealand in Splunk
OpenTelemetry is coming
OpenTelemetry is a rising star in the push toward tool consolidation, improving reliability and customer experience by unifying monitoring tools. Beyond the “nice to have,” this consolidation frees up resources to focus on the core business, addressing the growing need for a holistic view amid the proliferation of tools. The trend toward consolidating tools is gaining momentum as organizations worry about data dependency on vendors and prioritize standardization for efficiency and security.
OpenTelemetry ensures data control, even with a single vendor choice, mitigating vendor lock-in concerns. As tool consolidation continues amid complex hybrid cloud environments, organizations are turning to AI and automation, envisioning a future with intelligent, AI-based automation that seamlessly handles complexities. The imperative for interconnected observability, IT, and security tools will shape the trajectory of technology organizations.
Thomas Fikentscher, CyberArk ANZ Regional Director
The shift towards supplier consolidation will intensify the fight for superiority
More organizations are now mandated to do more with what they have already invested in. And more vendors are starting to build more solutions within the same platform.
We believe there is an opportunity for organizations to reevaluate the core features of their products and optimize your technology stacks based on what is critical.
Supplier consolidation will be a key trend in 2024. The fight for platform superiority will only intensify, influencing both partners and customers in their investment decisions. Organizations have recognized the importance of reducing the multitude of vendor solutions they are implementing to improve productivity and reduce costs. [they are] It is no longer manageable. At its core, this shift reflects a conversation focused on productivity within organizations: how can we effectively address security issues in a way that is productive and easy to implement at a cost we can absorb? This consideration applies to companies of all sizes and we will see all suppliers come together to establish their leadership.
Rob Dooley (VP APJ) and Sabeen Malik (VP global government affairs and publicpolitics) in Rapid7
Mid-market growth
The mid-market will be a growth area, with many looking to outsource cybersecurity as it is not a core competency. The budget is already being allocated as business owners and boards of directors recognize that it is essential to act and strengthen their defenses now. This segment is becoming more susceptible to attacks as a result of larger organizations making it more difficult for adversaries to penetrate their networks.
Tony Jarvis, VP of Enterprise Security at Darktrace
More new technologies will be layered on top of older technologies
With each passing year, a number of technologies are released to the market that aim to increase some of the gaps in existing defenses, or simply counter new techniques and exploits that threat actors leverage and exploit.
While 2024 will be no different from 2023 in this regard, what is changing is the growing number of technologies, categories, acronyms, and quadrants that security professionals must navigate.
The expression “old malware never dies” is certainly true, and similarly, newer technologies rarely replace more established controls, meaning many organizations are likely to have additional solutions in their security suite for next year.
The final result? CISOs need to spend time they don’t have researching an increasing number of tools, always questioning the opportunity cost of choosing one option over another.
