Top Security And Risk Management Trends For 2022

Security challenges lend themselves to three overarching trends impacting cybersecurity practices: new responses to sophisticated threats, the evolution and reframing of the security practice, and rethinking technology. The following trends will have broad industry impact across those three domains.

Attack surface expansion

Enterprise attack surfaces are expanding. Risks associated with the use of cyber-physical systems and IoT, open-source code, cloud applications, complex digital supply chains, social media and more have brought organizations’ exposed surfaces outside of a set of controllable assets. Organizations must look beyond traditional approaches to security monitoring, detection and response to manage a wider set of security exposures.

Digital risk protection services (DRPS), external attack surface management (EASM) technologies and cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) will support CISOs in visualizing internal and external business systems, automating the discovery of security coverage gaps.

Digital supply chain risk

Cybercriminals have discovered that attacks on the digital supply chain can provide a high return on investment. As vulnerabilities such as Log4j spread through the supply chain, more threats are expected to emerge. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2025, 45 percent of organizations worldwide will have experienced attacks on their software supply chains, a three-fold increase from 2021.

Digital supply chain risks demand new mitigation approaches that involve more deliberate risk-based vendor/partner segmentation and scoring, requests for evidence of security controls and secure best practices, a shift to resilience-based thinking and efforts to get ahead of forthcoming regulations.

Identity threat detection and response

Sophisticated threat actors are actively targeting identity and access management (IAM) infrastructure, and credential misuse is now a primary attack vector. Gartner introduced the term “identity threat detection and response” (ITDR) to describe the collection of tools and best practices to defend identity systems.

Distributing decisions

Enterprise cybersecurity needs and expectations are maturing, and executives require more agile security amidst an expanding attack surface. Thus, the scope, scale and complexity of digital business makes it necessary to distribute cybersecurity decisions, responsibility, and accountability across the organization units and away from a centralized function.

Beyond awareness

Human error continues to be a factor in many data breaches, demonstrating that traditional approaches to security awareness training are ineffective. Progressive organizations are investing in holistic security behavior and culture programs (SBCPs), rather than outdated compliance-centric security awareness campaigns. An SBCP focuses on fostering new ways of thinking and embedding new behavior with the intent to provoke more secure ways of working across the organization.

Vendor consolidation

Security technology convergence is accelerating, driven by the need to reduce complexity, reduce administration overhead and increase effectiveness. New platform approaches such as extended detection and response (XDR), security service edge (SSE) and cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPP) are accelerating the benefits of converged solutions.

Cybersecurity mesh

The security product consolidation trend is driving integration of security architecture components. However, there is still a need to define consistent security policies, enable workflows and exchange data between consolidated solutions. A cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA) helps provide a common, integrated security structure and posture to secure all assets, whether they’re on-premises, in data centers or in the cloud.