The coming year is expected to be an unprecedented one in terms of cybersecurity. Coupled with the recent surge in attacks, growing capabilities of hackers, migrations to the Cloud Era and incoming compliance and regulations, the year will see businesses redefine their approach to cybersecurity. With WannaCry and other numerous distributed ransomware attacks showed the world the importance of cybersecurity in making or breaking businesses. Such attacks have proven their global–reach capabilities, and will continue to be more mass–scale in 2018.
2018 is set to be the year when enterprise networks more or less go to cloud and virtualization. Organizations will have to ensure they understand and support the responsibility of securing their business over cloud. Networks will grow increasingly complex, putting the pressure on IT security teams to manage and monitor vast amounts of data. There is also a worrying talent shortage, with a lack of cybersecurity personnel to manage such issues.
Due to these issues, 2018 will witness a surge in the adoption of automated solutions that can deliver actionable intelligence to security practitioners of what to focus on and what tools are at their disposal to take action. The importance of automation will become even more crucial in cloud–networks.
Another key cybersecurity influencer will be the the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which are set to take full effect in May 2018. These regulations will impact any business with connections to E.U. operations or holding E.U. citizen data. Inability to comply with them will entail fines as large as up to €20 million or 4 percent of turnover.
For an India-centric view, a number of large scale government sponsored digitization endeavors; the smart cities; “Make in India” program; new transportation projects (airports and metro railways); development of telecom infrastructure; and digital banking and finance organizations will drive growth in managed security services. These will influence IT and OT (operational technology) network size complexity and will be vulnerable to more targeted attacks. Indian organizations (private, government and PSUs) will be seen investing heavily in multi-layer security solutions to rack up a holistic approach to cybersecurity, address the complexity of managing risk and protect their data against advanced threats on evolving networks.
WHAT THE INDUSTRY PREDICTS FOR 2018:
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“This past year, cyber criminals caused major service disruptions around the world, using their increasing technical proficiency to break through cyber defenses. In 2018, we expect the trend to become more pronounced as these attackers will use machine learning and artificial intelligence to launch even more potent attacks.”
Tarun Kaura
Director-Product Management
APJ, Symantec
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“Data Privacy is the New Tech Emergency The panic is setting in as today’s data-oriented companies fear non-compliance with Europe’s upcoming GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), which will go into effect on May 25, 2018. With this, the focus on data privacy will reach new heights.”
Bhaskar Agastya
Country Manager
Ixia, India
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“Government will continue to drive compliance policies, but where would the associated business cost be passed on to remains debatable. Internal security threats will remain the highest cybersecurity risks going into 2018 and most likely to originate within a business or organization.”
Nicky Fang
Sales Development Manager
Spirent Communications
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“Next year, ransomware will continue, because many systems go un-patched. Attackers will follow companies into the cloud. People who hold cryptocurrencies will face greater threats, as the valuations have increased. And nation-state activities will increase.”
Shrikant Shitole
Senior Director and Country Head for India
FireEye
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