Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Rob Clyde, Immediate Past Board Chair of ISACA, Board Director, Titus, and Executive Chair, White Cloud Security
Assessing Enterprise Risk in 2020
Today’s risk landscape is as turbulent as ever, and perhaps the only prediction one can make for sure is that there will be many inaccurate predictions. That’s the nature of risk. However, ISACA, CMMI Institute and Infosecurity commissioned a study to look at the types of risk that organizations are experiencing, their risk management maturity levels, the most critical categories of risk, and how quickly organizations are able to respond to emerging threats. There are lessons to be learned and applied to the coming year, so, from the results of this study, here are our predictions for 2020:
Cybersecurity risk will continue to be the most critical risk category facing enterprises.
Not surprisingly, survey respondents report that information/cybersecurity risk is the most critical risk category facing their enterprises. There is seemingly no end in sight to the major cyber incidents that organizations must prepare for, with the recent ransomware attack that prompted the city of New Orleans to declare a state of emergency providing the most recent example. Cyber risk is cited as the single most critical risk with almost double the percentage of the next closest critical risk type (29%, compared to a distant second-place reputational risk at 15%.)
Changes/advances in technology and changes in types of threats will be the top cybersecurity challenges.
In 2020, respondents expect changes/advances in technology (63%) and changes in type of threats (61%) to continue to be the top cybersecurity challenges. Increased number of threats and/or increased frequency of threat occurrence takes the third position at 52%.
Cloud-related risk will serve as a bellwether for newer technologies in earlier stages of adoption.
Cloud is by now no longer an emerging technology because most enterprises have adopted it extensively – although it continues to be a key source of potential new risk. The trajectory of cloud – both adoption dynamics and risk introduced – can serve as a bellwether for other, newer technologies, e.g. AI and IoT. Survey respondents still list cloud as the top technology that increases risk (at 70%), followed by IoT at 34% and machine learning and AI at 25%.
Risk itself, by nature, will continue to be difficult to predict.
The survey results hint that certain types of risk will be especially difficult to predict for specific geographic regions and industries. Statistically significant upswings in political risk are observed in the UK (this might be Brexit-related) and India. Operational risk is significantly more difficult to forecast for manufacturing and engineering market segments compared to other industry segments. Cybersecurity and technology risk, by contrast, are hardest (by a wide margin) to forecast for the financial services sector and insurance.
For the full survey results, visit www.isaca.org/state-of-risk.
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About the Author
Rob Clyde, Immediate Past Board Chair of ISACA, Board Director, Titus, and Executive Chair, White Cloud Security
Rob Clyde is executive chair of the board of directors for White Cloud Security (trusted app list enforcement), and independent board director for Titus (leader in data protection, categorization and classification) (USA). He is the managing director of Clyde Consulting LLC, which provides board and executive advisory services to cyber security software companies. He serves as an executive advisor to HyTrust (multi cloud workload security) and BullGuard Software (consumer and smart home cyber security). Prior to becoming chair of ISACA’s board of directors, he served as vice-chair, chaired the board-level ISACA Finance Committee and served as a member of ISACA’s Strategic Advisory Council, Conference and Education Board and the IT Governance Institute Advisory Panel. Previously, he was CEO of Adaptive Computing, which provides workload management software for some of the world’s largest cloud, high-performance computing, and big data environments. Prior to founding Clyde Consulting, he was chief technology officer at Symantec and a co-founder of Axent Technologies. Clyde is a frequent speaker at ISACA, cybersecurity conferences and for the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD). He also serves on the industry advisory council for the Management Information Systems Department of Utah State University (USA).
