In 2020 we will see the cyber industry redesigned in some key areas. Malware will undoubtedly evolve and ransomware will become more sophisticated, potentially even teaching businesses new ways to take payments and create customer service that encourages the victim to part with their money.

We’ve also seen the traditional IT environment transformed significantly in 2019 and set to change even more so going into 2020. Gartner had predicted that in 2020 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) workloads would suffer at least 60% fewer security incidents than those in traditional data centers. Interestingly, this is aligned with our research, which showed a tipping point in the perception of cloud security risk. 61 percent of security professionals believed that the risk of a security breach is the same or lower in cloud environments compared to on-premise. While there has also been a number of high profile cloud security breaches this year, I do expect the shift to continue and security to evolve as a result. Arguably, security in a cloud environment is not much different to that of on-premise; you just need to be asking different questions.

It will continue to be the simple, tried and tested types of attack that cause the most damage. Organizations still have a long way to go in terms of ensuring their people, processes and technology are standing up to the rigor of modern cyber attack. From ensuring good cyber hygiene, system patching, configuration checks and back ups are all part of a layered approach to security.

As well as the brilliant basics, organizations also need to ensure they are using all avenues of security that are open to them. Network security is paramount to having broad visibility as well as being able to identify and respond quickly to an incident and the DNS layer is a rich and important intelligence source. I expect to see a development of the Network Detection and Response category in 2020 as more organizations realize its potential to mitigate risk and defend and the organisation. Vendors will also likely be eyeing up this area for their own expansion.

We’ll also see the role of the CISO redesigned in 2020, as the imbalance of their work-life worsens and the role needs to change to meet the demands of the modern cyberscape; for example becoming more of a strategic resource for the business on mitigating risk and facilitating business transformation safely.

Read more on Network Detection and Response or the role of the CISO here.

Watch out for the next predictions blog from Dave Polton our VP of Solutions!