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Containment is Key to Defending Against Today's Threats

By Mario Espinoza, Chief Product Officer, Illumio

2022 was a turbulent year, and experts predict that 2023 will bring with it more economic uncertainty, conflict, and cybersecurity risk. As hybrid work remains the norm and cloud migration efforts continue to spur intracloud risks, this year, companies must reassess security priorities and investments to ensure they are maximizing return on investment (ROI) and strengthening business resilience.

As the threat landscape evolves, technology and security solutions must evolve alongside it. Here are the top cloud security and ransomware trends that business and security leaders can expect to see in 2023.

Cloud infrastructure will be a top target

To address economic uncertainty in 2023, it's natural that companies will turn to the cloud as an efficient way to tighten costs. However, as cloud adoption continues to accelerate, we'll see more organizations leverage a lift-and-shift approach - i.e., moving an application and its associated data to a cloud platform without redesigning the application itself - which will increase the attack surface while creating blind spots within an organization's cloud infrastructure.

These blind spots that appear in between hybrid environments give attackers an opportunity to move through networks undetected, making it all the more important for security teams to have visibility into their environments and proactively pinpoint areas of risk. Cloud architecture, if not properly configured or managed, will be a gold mine for ransomware attackers and other cyber adversaries in 2023.

Any organization, big or small, is at risk

In 2023, we will see indiscriminate cyberattacks continue. Organizations of every size and across every sector must remember that no organization is immune from breaches. Small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) will have to be as vigilant against attackers seeking to harvest their critical data and information as large scale enterprises - often with even less budget.

While large organizations frequently have more resources and peoplepower to mitigate sophisticated attacks, SMBs often operate with fewer security resources - and attackers know this well. In the coming year, we'll see more targeted ransomware attacks go after smaller enterprises that have vulnerabilities they can easily exploit and fewer resources.

It's a matter of containment, not prevention

We're experiencing a paradigm shift in cybersecurity. Organizations and business leaders need to shift their security mindset from one of prevention to one of containment in 2023.

The world must realize, and embrace the fact, that cyberattacks are inevitable. In today's hyperconnected world, bad actors are bound to breach perimeter defenses and gain access to the business. But just because an initial breach occurs doesn't mean it needs to result in a business disaster.

In 2023, proactive containment will become the norm. Organizations will accelerate their adoption of more proactive solutions and technologies that limit the size and scope of an attack. We'll see more organizations operating with an "assume breach" mindset (a Zero Trust best practice) and using tools designed to isolate attackers so that they cannot move throughout the network to access, steal, or destroy important data. Leveraging more proactive technologies in conjunction with pre-existing perimeter tools (i.e., firewalls) and detection and response strategies will empower more organizations to achieve resilience faster as the threat landscape evolves.

The silver lining in 2023 is that challenges breed innovation. While businesses will never be completely impervious to ransomware, with a greater industry-wide shift toward Zero Trust, we're moving in a direction that will enable the industry to face the unique challenges of an uncertain climate with more confidence.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As Chief Product Officer (CPO), Mario Espinoza is responsible for leading Illumio's product strategy and execution. Mario has a proven track record of creating and growing market leading products. Most recently, Mario was Vice President of SaaS Security and Data Protection at Palo Alto Networks, where he led product management and engineering for the CASB and Data Protection teams. Prior to Palo Alto Networks, Mario was Vice President of Product Management for Information Protection at Symantec, where he was responsible for Data Loss Prevention, Encryption, Data Classification and UEBA. Before that, Mario held various positions in the Symantec Enterprise Security product management organization.