How is the Cybersecurity Industry Changing?

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The cybersecurity industry is constantly evolving, for pretty obvious reasons. 

Cybersecurity professionals are here to protect data, systems, applications, and users. The focus is based on the CIA Triad (Confidentiality, Integrity, & Availability) . As business processes change, which require different digital supply- or tool-chains, the methods of securing them could change as well.

As fall of 2022 is upon us, the team at Pareto Cyber put together a bit of a retrospective look at the state of our industry and our view on the future. 

4 Key Trends in the Cybersecurity Industry

While cybersecurity is complex and different subsets of the industry have seen different shifts of their own, we think that there are four key trends within. Those trends are:

  1. Performance Goals are Replacing a Focus on Technology
  2. Increased Board and Executive Involvement
  3. Growing Popularity of Security Automation and XDR
  4. Increased Demand for Managed Security Services

Let’s take a look at these one by one.

Performance Goals are Replacing a Focus on Technology

Security operations have been moving away from focusing on technologies and tools in and of themselves. Instead, the success of cybersecurity programs is now measured more in terms of their overall performance in achieving an organization’s goals.

The discussions about cybersecurity used to center a lot around specific tools and technologies. We’d discuss how a new automation tool could be best implemented or work on addressing the configuration of particular endpoints.

Now, most organizations are concerned with high-level objectives. Cybersecurity teams are asking how they can decrease risks in the cloud or how to best decrease vulnerabilities that arise from working with external suppliers. 

We’re no longer talking about tools in and of themselves, but instead figuring out what outcomes those tools help us achieve. 

More companies have adopted a technology agnostic approach to cybersecurity. Instead of external security providers managing a specific type of system, such as Linux, vendors like us at Pareto Cyber are figuring out how we can integrate with whatever systems our clients need

This change is caused by the wider adoption of cloud services. Organizations across industries are depending more on the cloud and cross-device support, especially because of the recent popularity of remote work. More tools are also introducing APIs, enabling easier and deeper integration of different tools and services that an organization may use. 

As the array of tools and technologies within an enterprise tech stack increases, cybersecurity leaders shift their focus towards developing a coherent and comprehensive cybersecurity program. 

Increased Board and Executive Involvement

Executives across the C-Suite are becoming increasingly aware of and involved in security operations.

Rather than just the CIO or the CISO operating in a silo, cybersecurity is taking more of a center stage within executive discussions. Enterprises are realizing that security operations are not isolated from the rest of the organization. As the costs of enterprise data breaches increase, so do the risks.

A data breach affects an organization as a whole. If a cyber criminal breaches and locks up your sales data with some strain of ransomware, that means all of your sales operations cannot continue. Most organizations state that their top cybersecurity concerns are damage to their reputation, financial or customer harm, and business disruption. Cyber threats are not just the IT team’s problem, and executive boards are taking note.

To address cyber threats appropriately, more enterprises are adopting a risk-based mindset around their cybersecurity operations. Since the risks to the organization are not isolated to the IT department, the approach to addressing those vulnerabilities shouldn’t be isolated either. 

Gartner estimates that in 2025 most organizations will use cybersecurity risk as a key factor in their business operations. Executives getting more involved in cybersecurity is a wonderful change to see, since investing in protecting digital assets helps your entire organization. Many businesses are functioning almost entirely online, especially with remote workers and physically dispersed office locations. 

Growing Popularity of Security Automation and XDR

Organizations that adopt an extended detection and response (XDR) approach see vast improvements in their security outcomes.

If an organization that implemented XDR is breached, the costs associated with that breach are much lower than for companies who haven’t. According to IBM, organizations that deployed XDR and security automation lost around $3M less per data breach. Those organizations detected breaches and responded to them around 10% faster than companies not using XDR.

These superior outcomes are not surprising. XDR is at its core all about pulling all security data together into one coherent program. Different aspects of your IT infrastructure, such as endpoints, networks, or cloud services, are interlinked and so are their associated security vulnerabilities. The chain of a cyber attack can easily cross between different aspects of your ecosystem, so the way your organization detects and remediates security events should correspond to that reality.

In addition, as organizations move to the cloud and IT infrastructure gets more complex and intricate, so should your security operations. XDR helps you maintain visibility into every possible attack vector. Then, if a security alert is detected, intelligent automation and insights from machine learning can help you speed up your response.

Thanks to improved visibility and efficiency, companies that adopt XDR see significantly better security outcomes. 

Increased Demand for Managed Security Services

The last cybersecurity trend we’ve observed over the last few years is the growing demand for outsourced managed security services.

Organizations are struggling to hire and keep experienced cybersecurity talent. 60% of enterprises responding to the 2022 ISACA survey struggle to find qualified cybersecurity specialists. Yet just because your team does not have in-house security specialists, that doesn’t mean that you can neglect your security operations. So the best alternative for most enterprises is outsourcing those operations to an external cybersecurity services vendor.

Managed detection and response (MDR) services can function just like an in-house team but at a fraction of the cost. For example, at Pareto Cyber we have a virtual CISO program, helping our clients set cybersecurity goals and appropriately manage their risks just as an internal security executive would.

It’s also important to highlight that not all managed security services providers (MSSPs) are made equal. We’ve written extensively on the issues common with some MSSPs. Your organization needs to ensure that your outsourced MDR vendor does not cut corners when protecting both your systems and their own. According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), cyber criminals are increasingly targeting MSSPs since by breaching one MSSP they can gain access to the internal systems of multiple companies at once. 

Make sure that your service provider is not causing more vulnerabilities for your data than they claim to be solving.

Keep Up with Shifts in Cybersecurity

If you’d like to learn more about all the shifts in the cybersecurity industry that we’ve outlined above, you may be interested in reading some of our other posts:

If you’re ready to try working with a professional and experienced managed security services provider, contact our team at Pareto Cyber. We will happily set you up for a free risk assessment and discuss cybersecurity solutions to fit your organization’s needs.

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