Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Managing Cybersecurity for the Distributed Workforce
By Peter Albert, Chief
Information Security Officer at InfluxData
It's been nearly two years
since we fundamentally shifted the way we work - and saying we've adjusted is
an understatement. Organizations successfully made our work lives more
productive by investing in solutions that break down barriers and improve collaboration
in new ways. Technology will always drive more efficient ways to collaborate,
but it also opens organizations up to a new wave of challenges.
As all companies were
navigating through the unknown, securing the remote workforce was a top
concern. Our physical-to-virtual world switch made business continuity
possible, and now that we've adapted to this way of working, our efforts to
keep it secure will be the next great area of exploration and growth.
Companies tackle the
security skills gap in new ways: Working
in cybersecurity is basically living in the job skills gap. But IT leaders
shouldn't think of security as a separate entity with a siloed team and
resources. Security must be distributed and embedded into the organization, and
baked into every aspect of the stack, meaning security is incorporated into the
day-to-day of every employee and department, and that includes training staff
on security best practices related to their post. That way, the entire company
becomes the security team.
After all, most breaches
continue to happen the same way - compromised credentials, social engineering,
or common vulnerabilities in unpatched software that are exploited. What has
changed is our level of vulnerability due to societal changes - the attack surface
is everywhere now. By having a security-first mindset across the entire
organization, companies will be better equipped to identify and mitigate these
risks.
Security teams double down
on modeling user behavior: Ten years
ago, an organization's IT portfolio was all in-house in a data center, but now
applications and services are hosted almost entirely in the cloud. However only
a subset of these cloud applications implement effective fraud detection, and
still fewer offer observability into who and how these services are being
utilized. This means organizations who consume cloud services are largely on
their own to optimize security so it's becoming increasingly difficult for IT
leaders to monitor security behaviors.
Next year, CISOs will improve
security monitoring by modeling user behavior of external cloud services using
mathematics and behavioral modeling derived from time series data. This will
enable them to detect signals and patterns in security events in a timely
fashion across a very broad attack surface. This approach also takes a lot of
manual work out of forensics and incident management workflows, resulting in
more automated and therefore more enhanced defense measures.
Back to the basics:
Dependency verification becomes a C-suite issue: Verification of third party dependencies is a global
issue and is both pervasive and difficult to detect without source code review.
Teams should never download unverified code from another source and then
incorporate into their application or send it straight to their shell to
execute in whatever user context they are using, oftentimes root. When this
happens, teams lose the visibility of what is in the code they're
executing.
The hyper-connected nature of
software development and service delivery is causing the scale of this issue to
become gigantic. In 2022 and beyond, security leaders will push their
organizations to prioritize dependency verification and security - embedding
these security practices throughout their company.
The bottom line
Keeping pace with the scale
of cybersecurity has been a top organizational priority for years. In 2022,
just as we have with every other challenge we've faced along the journey,
businesses will combat cybersecurity obstacles with innovation. This will
include addressing skills gaps, doubling down on security modeling using
time-series data, and continuing to build on our security basics including
training the entire org on security best practices.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Albert | CISO,
InfluxData
As the Chief Information
Security Officer (CISO) at InfluxData, Peter Albert is responsible for ensuring
the security of InfluxData's information systems and services. With more
than 30 years of experience in the security, technology and telecommunications
industries, Peter brings tremendous technical leadership and operational
expertise to the company.
Prior to joining InfluxData,
Peter spent 3 years at IOActive, a premier, boutique security consultancy,
where he advised various Global 1000 companies on their security program.
Before that, he was responsible for managing global operations and expansion of
the QualysGuard global SaaS infrastructure, overseeing its worldwide security
operation centers (SOCs). He has also held various leadership positions in
architecture, engineering and operations with iPass Inc. and General
Magic.