Richard Addiscott, Senior Director Analyst and Rob McMillan, Managing Vice President at Gartner, have revealed the top cybersecurity predictions for 2022-23 in the opening keynote at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in Sydney.
“We can’t fall into old habits and try to treat everything the same as we did in the past,” said Addiscott. “Most security and risk leaders now recognize that major disruption is only one crisis away. We can’t control it, but we can evolve our thinking, our philosophy, our program and our architecture.”
Gartner recommends that cybersecurity leaders build the following strategic planning assumptions into their security strategies for the next two years.
Through 2023, government regulations requiring organizations to provide consumer privacy rights will cover 5 billion citizens and more than 70 percent of global GDP.
As of 2021, almost 3 billion individuals had access to consumer privacy rights across 50 countries, and privacy regulation continues to expand. Gartner recommends that organizations track subject rights request metrics, including cost per request and time to fulfill, to identify inefficiencies and justify accelerated automation.
By 2025, 80 percent of enterprises will adopt a strategy to unify web, cloud services and private application access from a single vendor’s SSE platform.
Vendors are offering an integrated security service edge (SSE) solution to deliver consistent and simple web, private access and SaaS application security. Single-vendor solutions provide significant operational efficiency and security effectiveness compared with best-of-breed solutions, including tighter integration, fewer consoles to use, and fewer locations where data must be decrypted, inspected and re-encrypted.
60 percent of organizations will embrace Zero Trust as a starting point for security by 2025. More than half will fail to realize the benefits.
Zero trust is prevalent in security vendor marketing and in security guidance from governments. It requires a cultural shift and clear communication that ties it to business outcomes to achieve the benefits.
By 2025, 60 percent of organizations will use cybersecurity risk as a primary determinant in conducting third-party transactions and business engagements.
Cyberattacks related to third parties are increasing. Only 23 percent of security and risk leaders monitor third parties in real time for cybersecurity exposure. Gartner believes organizations will start to mandate cybersecurity risk as a significant determinant when conducting business with third parties, ranging from simple monitoring of a critical technology supplier to complex due diligence for mergers and acquisitions.
Through 2025, 30 percent of nation states will pass legislation that regulates ransomware payments, fines and negotiations, up from less than 1 percent in 2021.
Modern ransomware gangs steal data as well as encrypt it. The decision to pay the ransom or not is a business-level decision, not a security one. Gartner recommends engaging a professional incident response team as well as law enforcement and any regulatory body before negotiating.
By 2025, threat actors will have weaponized operational technology environments successfully to cause human casualties.
Attacks on OT – hardware and software that monitors or controls equipment, assets and processes – have become more common and disruptive. In operational environments, security and risk management leaders should be more concerned about real world hazards to humans and the environment, rather than information theft.
By 2025, 70 percent of CEOs will mandate a culture of organizational resilience to survive coinciding threats from cybercrime, severe weather events, civil unrest and political instabilities.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the inability of traditional business continuity management planning to support the organization’s response to a large-scale disruption. Gartner recommends that risk leaders recognize organizational resilience as a strategic imperative and build an organization-wide resilience strategy that also engages staff, stakeholders, customers and suppliers.
By 2026, 50 percent of C-level executives will have performance requirements related to risk built into their employment contracts.
Most boards regard cybersecurity as a business risk rather than solely a technical IT problem, according to a recent Gartner survey. There will be a shift in formal accountability for the treatment of cyber risks from the security leader to senior business leaders.
