General trend: growth of the market of information security solutions
Protecting sensitive data is becoming as high a priority for organizations as the quality and functionality of their services. The fact of data leakage can become a significant argument in favor of abandoning the company’s products. Pay attention to how services are changing: banking applications offer free protection against scam calls, and household financial accounting programs offer a complex authentication system.
This is partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As we learn to wash our hands more often and wear masks, businesses are faced with the need to be just as mindful of protecting their infrastructure. What are the main reasons for these changes?
First, many companies had to go online to save business. Most of these companies – small and medium-sized businesses, where there were no information security specialists – became an easy target for cybercriminals.
Secondly, companies have switched to remote work. Work systems that could previously be easily controlled at the office perimeter have been distributed to employees’ home computers. To ensure security, it was necessary to correctly configure the virtual desktop infrastructure, and here it was impossible to do without an experienced system administrator or VDI out of the box. Poorly configured VDI or its absence is a potentially weak link in information security systems.
Thirdly, the stressful state of the market has led to more intense competition. Massive DDoS attacks, which are now an order of magnitude cheaper than marketing wars, have become a tool of competition.The fourth reason goes beyond the consequences of the pandemic, being a more serious market trend. The architecture of services is becoming more complex: their functionality is growing exponentially, as is the number of users, which, of course, affects the approach to the quantity and quality of the supporting infrastructure. In complex systems, there is always an increased risk of making a mistake that forms an entry point for cybercriminals, so more and more modern information security solutions are required.
What to expect in 2022
The segment of information security in the cloud infrastructure has shown the greatest growth in recent years. Virtual machines impress with the speed of deployment and the flexibility of the resource payment model. In the cloud, it is easier to build more complex architectural models; multi-cloud, combining clouds of several vendors, and hybrid infrastructures are gaining popularity.
The trend towards complication is decisive for the market. It is a consequence of the decrease in Time-to-Market – the speed of delivering the value of the product to the end consumer. Companies developing services are building processes for the continuous integration of new solutions.But just building a fortress wall around your infrastructure with the help of firewalls is no longer enough, because modern threats can increasingly come not from the outside, but from the inside, through vulnerabilities in the code and in the software used.
Protection both inside and out
One of the trends, Shift Left Security, suggests that when developing services, the issue of their security is raised one step before the application goes into production, that is, the product code is written in such a way as to prevent vulnerabilities from appearing. To do this, such information security solutions are being developed as static and dynamic analyzers, component and dependency analyzers, image scanners, etc. New areas appear – DevSecOps and Application Security, whose task is to monitor the security of code and CI/CD.
Restoring the Security Perimeter
The list of the most common ways to hack corporate systems in 2021 has generally remained unchanged. Hacks using social engineering methods, password guessing, configuration errors, and attacks on services within the network are still in the lead.
The actions of cybercriminals are becoming more complex, they are beginning to use
artificial intelligence to create the most personalized email traps. But the fact remains: despite the powerful educational program in the field of information security, hacking through company employees is still effective and the easiest to perform.
With the growing popularity of telecommuting and multi-platform services, getting to a person has become easier. Due to the fact that an employee can enter company-critical systems from a mobile phone or work via Wi-Fi in the nearest coffee shop, the security perimeter is blurred. Often, work computers replace people’s household laptops: during the day you work in a company’s data analytics system, and in the evening you collect a grocery basket in a delivery service.
Traditional security measures – data encryption, use of secure protocols, network filters – are no longer enough. Therefore, new tools are emerging, the main purpose of which is to restore the very boundaries of network security by allocating safe zones for work or restricting work with software and some sites. These are solutions such as Cloud Access Security Broker, Application Control, Sandbox, Web-Filtering.Sometimes restrictions are necessary so that an employee does not take out confidential company data to services convenient for himself, but chooses from a list of software approved by security guards.
Security Monitoring
Another trending segment of information security solutions is monitoring. Everyone knows infrastructure monitoring solutions such as Prometheus, Zabbix, etc., which will send an alarm signal when the network load is exceeded and other anomalies on the servers. Now imagine a tool that can monitor the information security system of your service, find vulnerabilities in accordance with the latest updates, or notice atypical user behavior thanks to AI technologies.
System Certification
Another important trend is compliance, that is, the compliance of services and infrastructure with information security requirements defined by law or international standards. The end users of the product, especially in B2B and B2C, understand the importance of security and demand it from their contractors. The most popular method of confirmation is certification or attestation for compliance with a standard from an authorized organization.
Security-as-a-Service
The Security-as-a-Service trend refers to the general trend of the cloud market – the development of Managed services, where the client can delegate most of the complex tasks to external experts if there are no in-house specialists with the necessary competencies. In addition, from an economic point of view, hiring and onboarding one or more employees will cost more than purchasing a service from a specialized provider.
Quite popular are IT services for system administration of infrastructure, assistance with migration from dedicated servers to the cloud. Similar services appear in the field of information security. Setting up network security, choosing the right infrastructure, and optimizing the portfolio of information security solutions is a difficult task for a single group of security professionals. And if a company does not have the ability to maintain a permanent staff of such specialists, Managed Services in the field of information security can be a good solution.
Choosing a provider as part of an information security strategy
Often, taking care of information security begins with the choice of an infrastructure provider. It should be approached with the same logic as choosing a bank, but with the amendment that it is not money that is stored, but data. By choosing a reliable company with experience in the market, you are already forming the basic concept of protection. Some providers have default protection against DDoS attacks, and if one of the neighbors in the public cloud shows suspicious network activity, the provider can legally limit their network traffic.
Another argument in favor of a good provider is the variety of products.By renting the infrastructure, you can immediately order the services necessary for information security: firewalls, secure VPN connection, endpoint protection, etc., which are easier to integrate into the infrastructure, and the cost is lower.
And most importantly, reliable providers keep up with the times, which means that the above trends have either already been implemented by them or are included in the product development roadmap for the next year.