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Opus Security Predictions for 2024: The Year of Orchestration

By Meny Har, CEO and co-founder of Opus Security

Cloud Security Posture Management and Vulnerability solutions have become staples of almost every organization's security stack, ensuring that what were once security blind spots across many attack surfaces would now be fully visible and help security teams assess risk clearly. This has created an environment in which security teams are constantly inundated with security issues without context or prioritization. Across diverse security landscapes, such noise inevitably creates mistrust between security and the engineers who own and lead remediation processes, who don't know whether the issue they've been given to resolve is even important or relevant. In addition, the amount of alerts leads to the ominous ‘alert fatigue' that plagues many organizations and harms their overall resilience and security posture. The need to consolidate issues from multiple sources, prioritize with the proper context and ensure organization-wide collaboration for swift remediation of what matters most - with developer buy-in! - will become an organizational necessity in 2024. 

The year of the Risk Orchestrator  

As remediation becomes a more organization-wide task, security leaders will need to find more creative ways to ensure that this collaboration - mainly between security and engineering teams - is productive, with minimal friction and frustrations. As it stands today, developers are justifiably annoyed by the time and effort required for remediation processes, which are complex, difficult to understand, and challenging to implement. As these developers take on more significant security responsibilities, it will become the role of CISOs to facilitate risk orchestration across the organization and for operational teams to orchestrate day-to-day operations across disparate teams to remediate effectively. They will now be tasked with creating productive, trustworthy, day-to-day relationships between security and engineering teams to establish a coherent view of security risks and provide actionable solutions. 

Security will become more about people and processes and less about tools

Security teams can no longer undertake security processes on their own, and once this has been established, it is becoming increasingly clear that effective cybersecurity necessitates more than the latest advancements in cybersecurity technology. More than just new tools, security now takes into account the growing number of teams involved in every process. The importance of tying all teams, tools, processes, and alerts together has grown considerably, creating an entirely new concern for security professionals - orchestration. The cross-functional nature of security will require an adaptation in approaches to responsibility, ownership, and accountability, with remediation processes becoming cross-organizational and not siloed in the security space alone.

The Year of the Remediation Evolution

Over the past few years, remediation has become a key element in traditional security spaces, including Vulnerability Management, Cloud Security, Application Security, and others. In the past, remediation was considered an IT-centric process, often static and very centralized. In 2024, we foresee that remediation will become an independent platform, no longer a feature of existing security tools. Taking a more central role as a critical organizational security process, remediation will aggregate disparate remediation processes from across the entire security landscape into a centralized, all-encompassing security remediation platform. 

The Year of Efficiency

The post-COVID economic reality of the past few years, exacerbated by market shifts and talent shortages, has inevitably bolstered the rise in demand for more efficient solutions to pressing security challenges. Forced to rely on a diluted workforce, organizations seek efficient, streamlined processes that leverage existing environments but work independently and replace manual, laborious efforts. Efficient remediation includes delivering the right context to engineers, prioritizing alerts, rapidly finding owners, and improving remediation reports. Leveraging automation to do these critical tasks, thereby removing most of the manual and laborious elements of remediation, is an increasingly necessary part of modern business. For Opus, remediating at scale across disparate environments, teams, and infrastructures would not be possible without leveraging automation to identify responsible teams for remediation processes, provide out-of-the-box guides and playbooks, and prioritize issues to alleviate alert fatigue and developer frustration. 

Collaborative processes have always been critical for productive business processes, and forward-thinking organizations should strive to ensure streamlined workflows across the entire company. Security once considered a distinct, barricaded part of every organization, has evolved into a business enabler that includes multiple teams in its processes. For remediation processes, this is a positive shift, ensuring a wider and more transparent approach to benefit both business and security and 2024 will be a significant milestone in this evolution. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Meny Har is the CEO and co-founder of Opus Security. In his previous position, he was the first employee and VP Product at Siemplify, from its inception and until its eventual acquisition by Google. Meny's past professional experience includes various security leadership and development roles, following his introduction to cybersecurity during his service in an elite intelligence unit of the Israeli Defense Forces, as a Department Head of Operations.