Businesses and individuals alike experienced hard times in 2020, and everyone is hoping things improve in the new year. However, the pandemic is still widespread, and businesses need to continue to sustain their device and data security with continuous security enhancements and monitoring routines.
As we evangelize cybersecurity awareness, here are some key cybersecurity predictions for 2021 from ManageEngine Cyber Town.
According to a survey report published by Skybox in November 2020, 70 percent of organizations mentioned that at least one-third of their employees will remain remote for next 18 months, meaning the remote trends set in 2020 will continue into 2021. IT teams will continue to enhance their endpoint protections, and implement more collaborative tools like Slack, Skype, Microsoft Teams, and more.
With more and more people working from home, they're accessing corporate data from both corporate and personal devices. Organizations and IT teams should ensure that no matter what devices employees use for work purposes, their data remains secure.
To strengthen device and data security, IT admins can deploy restrictions based on devices, applications, robust authentication norms, and Zero Trust policies, which will ensure all devices are scrutinized before they dock themselves to the parent network. Password policies, privileged and identity access management, data security management, and user device monitoring can assist IT teams in facilitating better enterprise cybersecurity.
Organizations are already migrating from on-premises-based applications to the cloud due to the ease of security they experience with Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. With people working remotely, unified security over their collaborative tools is far more efficient than managing each application in each device individually. With SaaS applications, there's less time required for setup and maintenance.
The industry will see more distributed clouds, a method of migrating business procedures to both the public and private cloud. As per Gartner's 2021 cloud development analysis report, distributed cloud systems are the new way forward, providing organizations with significant security benefits.
Automation has already made IT routines easier. With the introduction and implementation of hyper automation, IT teams will be able to automate as many IT processes as possible to keep things running smoothly with the help of artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and deception technology.
Considering the amount of data flowing in and out of organizations, and the attacks constantly being launched into the cyberworld, companies can't neglect a robust cybersecurity strategy. Hyper automation will play a key role in 2021 in helping organizations combat these attacks.
Numerous phishing campaigns were launched during the pandemic, and this trend will continue to grow in 2021; for example, reports from WatchGuard state that cyber criminals have already created tools that can automate the manual steps of spear phishing attacks. With the aid of this automation, cyber criminals can launch more phishing campaigns, giving them time to build more robust scripts to infiltrate targeted networks.
Just like the COVID-19 vaccine, cybersecurity excellence will become a deciding factor of the success of businesses in 2021, as employees continue to work from home this year. Organizations need to formulate, document, implement, practice and audit their cybersecurity strategy to keep their remote workforce and corporate data safe from the hands of malicious actors.
