Senior businesses awareness of cybersecurity, legal and compliance issues and cloud-delivered products are some of the trends driving the industry, according to Gartner.
According to its Top Six Security and Risk Management Trends, Gartner said that “business leaders are becoming increasingly conscious of the impact cybersecurity can have on business outcomes” and encouraged security leaders to harness this increased support and take advantage of its six emerging trends “to improve their organization’s resilience while elevating their own standing.” The trends are as follows:
- Trend No. 1: Senior business executives are finally becoming aware that cybersecurity has a significant impact on the ability to achieve business goals and protect corporate reputation
- Trend No. 2: Legal and regulatory mandates on data protection practices are impacting digital business plans and demanding increased emphasis on data liabilities
- Trend No. 3: Security products are rapidly exploiting cloud delivery to provide more-agile solutions
- Trend No. 4: Machine learning is providing value in simple tasks and elevating suspicious events for human analysis
- Trend No. 5: Security buying decisions are increasingly based on geopolitical factors along with traditional buying considerations
- Trend No. 6: Dangerous concentrations of digital power are driving decentralization efforts at several levels in the ecosystem
In regard to cloud computing, which Gartner said is affected by trends 3 and 6, “new detections technologies, activities and authentication models require vast amounts of data that can quickly overwhelm current on-premises security solutions” and this is driving a rapid shift toward cloud-delivered security products which “are more capable of using the data in near real time to provide more-agile and adaptive solutions.”
Also with regards to emerging trends, Gartner predicted that “by 2025, machine learning will be a normal part of security solutions and will offset ever-increasing skills and staffing shortages” as well as offering solutions to multiple security issues, such as adaptive authentication, insider threats, malware and advanced attackers.
Peter Firstbrook, research vice-president at Gartner, said: “Look at how machine learning can address narrow and well-defined problem sets, such as classifying executable files, and be careful not to be suckered by hype.
“Unless a vendor can explain in clear terms how its machine learning implementation enables its product to outperform competitors or previous approaches, it's very difficult to unpack marketing from good machine learning.”