We are rapidly approaching the end of the decade. Over the past 10 years, there have been a number of innovations in cybersecurity, cloud computing, AI and machine learning, IoT and more. As the industry looks ahead to 2020, many businesses and consumers around the world are asking, “What’s next?”
We’ve talked to the best in the industry about their predictions and insights for the upcoming year. See below for what they have to say:
Dave Wisz, EVP, Operations, US Signal
“Cyberattacks are only going to increase in numbers and sophistication, and natural disasters are going to continue to cause downtime for companies. Next year will also see more companies turning to data-driven forms of operations such as machine learning and AI.
These factors, combined, mean that 2020 will see an increased need for regional edge data centers that will provide customers with reliable network connectivity to their data and infrastructure housed in a colocation space.
This will drive customers to regional data center providers that will provide them with high capacity, dedicated network connectivity solutions that enable their data to be processed at the speed necessary for machine learning applications and AI platforms.
In addition, more customers will also realize that replication of data between multiple geodiverse data centers will increase their ability to recover data quickly to the cloud or another location to eliminate downtime in the event of any disaster, including cyberattacks and weather-related occurrences. Thus, 2020 will see more data centers being opened in the middle of the country, where less severe weather patterns occur. Data centers on the coasts and in weather-prone areas will become less desirable.
Lastly, in 2020, more companies will inquire about how data center providers can assist with managed services and data protection to help when there is a disaster. This concern will be at the forefront due to recent mass cyberattacks such as the ransomware attack that affected 22 Texas towns, and many providers will likely expand their offerings beyond disaster recovery and storage into security.”
Phil White, CTO, Scale Computing
“Most artificial intelligence (AI) technology today relies on the cloud, and makes decisions based on the collection of data that is stored in the cloud it is accessing. However, this can cause latency as data has to travel to data centers and then back to the device. For example, this can be problematic for self-driving cars, which cannot wait for the roundtrip of data to know when to brake, or how fast to travel.
As a result of this, more organizations are turning to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and edge computing to capture data at the source of creation, specifically to support high-performance use cases, such as AI. The implementation of HCI and edge computing in AI will see the industry reduced form factors, since HCI allows for technology to operate within a smaller hardware design. In fact, some companies have already announced that they will be launching HCI edge compute clusters that are no bigger than a cup of coffee.
By 2020, it is expected that 80% of all devices will have an artificial intelligence (AI) feature. While the cloud has provided AI the platform it needed to grow to the level of being available on nearly every technological device, the combination of HCI and edge computing will give AI the tools needed to evolve to the next frontier, with smarter and faster decision making for organizations in 2020.”
Alan Conboy, office of the CTO, Scale Computing
“We are living in a world that is increasingly data-driven, and that data is being generated outside of the four walls of the traditional data center. With 2020 approaching, organizations are taking a much deeper look at their organization’s cloud usage. Cloud was originally positioned as the answer to all problems, but now the question is at what cost?
More organizations are turning to hybrid cloud and edge computing strategies, turning to solutions that process data at the source of its creation. In 2020, organizations will rely on hybrid environments, with edge computing collecting, processing and reducing vast quantities of data, which is then later uploaded to a centralized data center or the cloud.”
Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing
“For a long time, the conversation around edge computing has been focused on hitting the right buzz words without actually addressing the customer’s needs. Everyone has forgotten that the customer’s objectives don’t revolve around the latest technology; what they care about is that their applications are online and working correctly. When catering to these businesses in 2020, technology partners have to remember to think about their needs and wants versus what’s currently trending among IT professionals.
Edge Computing is about running mission critical applications outside the datacenter. Full stop. There are varying use cases, workloads, and needs within that envelope, but at the root of the issue is the need to run applications somewhere other than the cloud or datacenter. Customers want a simple solution equipped with the right technology to manage their IT and decrease the two biggest costs affecting IT departments: downtime and people.
While IT professionals are concerned with the conveniences of datacenters, customers care more about how physical size, noise and power consumption will affect the quality of their business and productivity. In 2020, businesses offering edge solutions should worry less about marketing and focus on what edge computing actually is – delivering the solutions your customers actually want.”
Alan Conboy, office of the CTO, Scale Computing
“According to Statista, the global IoT market will explode from $2.9 trillion in 2014 to $8.9 trillion in 2020. That means companies will be collecting data and insights from nearly everything we touch from the moment we wake up and likely even while we sleep. As evidence of this, technologists have seen that the rise of edge computing and IoT was accelerated by the birth of the iPhone.
Seeing what Apple has achieved, we are going to see a much broader perspective on this ability to put reasonable amounts of compute into a tiny form factor and move that into dedicated functions. In 2020, as a result, we can expect to see evolutionary expansion in the IoT space, not revolutionary. It will continue to evolve, driven by a need for more efficient, more compelling, cost effective solutions, with edge computing at the forefront.”
Jeff Keyes, Director of Product Marketing, Plutora:
“2020 is when the reality of autonomous teams is going to hit. The majority of enterprises are changing their software development organizations to have durable, multi-year funded, 2-pizza sized teams that have transformed from project oriented to real product teams. These teams are self-directed with high-level goals that they will implement iteration after iteration. That transformation is going to be even more pronounced in 2020.
Managing risk, compliance and governance will create friction to their success. If you want an analogy, this isn’t all that different than giving car keys to a teenager. The goal is that we have to get teams to a place so that they can act autonomously, but they don’t do damage to anyone else they are sharing the roadways with. We want everyone to drive on their own – and now is the time when we actually figure out how to make it happen.
While Agile practices help solve problems in planning, new problems arise around risk & compliance, governance and activity coordination between teams. Agile practices alone can’t solve these problems but rather a systems approach dealing with Agile and DevOps practices enable the product teams of the future. Product management will expand in caring not only about the features they deliver, but the efficiency of the software factory that produces them.”
Bob Davis, CMO, Plutora:
“In 2019, we’ve seen growing urgency around digital transformation, and I fully expect that to continue into 2020. As we move into the 11th year since DevOps was ‘born,’ the need to take agile methodologies to the next level – to scale them to support the largest enterprises – is paramount. 2020 will be the year that Value Stream Management (VSM) will serve as the platform that provides predictive insight and visibility for the entire process from idea to cash. Agile Planning and DevOps will come together to form truly converged pipelines.
The benefit will be the ability to optimize software delivery processes to ensure the highest quality applications are delivered on time and at the most efficient cost and resource allocation possible. The success at achieving this will be a critical success factor for the very survival of those enterprises.”
John Ford, chief information security officer, ConnectWise
“While it has taken a while, the MSP community is finally realizing that preventing attacks is simply not attainable, nor is consuming all of one’s budget in this area. The smart money is in investing in both detection and response so an MSP can stand a decent chance of saving their business. While there are many components to detection and response, the fuel that adds the most value to both is the sharing of valuable threat intelligence.
MSPs today operate in silos, which only benefits the attackers. When we share details of an attack, we are essentially creating a community that can act as one when it comes to detecting and responding to the overwhelming number of attacks that are available. I believe MSPs are coming around to the value of threat intelligence along with the realization that the more their communities share, the less likely they themselves will be unprepared to adequately detect and respond to the event. Will the use and sharing of threat intelligence become ubiquitous in 2020? Probably not, but it will likely become so within the next few years.”
Jessica Marie, senior director, Strategic and Corporate Initiatives, WhiteHat Security
“In a post-GDPR world, and now looking squarely ahead at the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) that’s about to take effect in January 2020, marketers will have to balance their need for first-party data and customer privacy. Customer identity and data privacy are at the core of every marketing strategy. However, I believe in 2020, marketers will have to face more responsibility and accountability in their use and handling of customer data. It’s only a matter of time before the U.S. passes a similar mandate to GDPR, and I think we can all get a head start and prioritize privacy. I believe this will be a positive change, given that many customers are more aware of how their data is being used, and look for organizations to have more responsible practices in the handling of that data. Data privacy will ultimately be a huge competitive advantage.”
Anu Yamunan, VP, Products, Exabeam
“Today’s security management tools are not the same as they were in 2005. Early SIEMs, also known as SIEM 1.0, began as a system of basic if-then rules, compliance reports and log repository. SIEMs with only relational databases are disappearing, and there is a need to analyze more data from a variety of sources with built-in analytics correlating and analyzing activities across broad time windows.
Now, SIEMs have scaled horizontally to expand their volumes of data streaming. They have also expanded to provide timelines of entity activities, machine learning-based risk profiling and automation. With the explosive growth of log data and the scarcity of security expertise, legacy SIEMs are becoming more expensive and leaving organizations open to increasingly complex and unpredictable cyberattacks.
Arguably, SIEM 1.0 has become mostly obsolete due to the leaders in the space evolving greatly with analytics. As we move forward in 2020, next-generation platforms will continue to expand the workflows, the audiences (beyond the SOC) and the use cases. Collecting more log data, using AI-driven behavioral analytics to detect attacks and automating incident response will become the standard. The use cases will evolve beyond the traditional cybersecurity use cases into financial fraud and business application analytics.”
Bryan Becker, DAST product manager, WhiteHat Security
“Security organizations will begin accepting that there is just too much to do, and not enough resources. Teams will start looking for methods to make the overall process less demanding as well as for new techniques to allocate resources most effectively.
Vendors will start to focus more on making the process easier, while teams will start to lean more on defense in depth than perhaps they were previously. Prioritization techniques and frameworks will start having a seat at the front of the table. Asset management, discovery, and documentation will continue to be a challenge for enterprise organizations”
John Ford, chief information security officer, ConnectWise
“Like any market, opportunists will pursue an economic dream so long as the barriers to entry are low, return on investment is high, and competing interests do not drive down margin or market size. Ransomware is as close to a perfect economy as one could enter, other than the fact that it is an illegal underground market.
2019 saw a dramatic increase in the amount of malicious code created and made available for sale on the black market. The seller not only makes the code affordable ($300-$500), they also provide full tech support in teaching the attacker how to execute an attack. This code is then further modified by the purchaser. This last action makes certain that security products that may have seen and prevented the original code, will likely fail to do the same with the modified version. A single version of modified malicious code could yield hundreds of thousands of dollars, and when the ransomware fails to execute, the attacker simply modifies the code and continues on.
Given that the number of attack groups has risen by 25% over the past year, coupled with the fact that the amount of malicious code has exponentially increased and the barrier to entry remains low, I do not see any reduction in the amount of ransomware attacks for 2020.”
Alan Conboy, office of the CTO, Scale Computing
“The recent news cycle has been flooded with organizations from airlines to banks and hospitals, even entire local governments, falling victim to ransomware attacks. Threats such as these are evolving at a horrific pace, and they will continue to become smarter, more lucrative and increasingly devious in 2020. So, to the organizations that think they can’t afford to modernize their infrastructure defenses, well, the truth is that they can’t afford to not do so.
As this malicious momentum snowballs into next year, businesses must realize that traditional legacy tools are not only slowing their digital journey down, but leaving them vulnerable to tactical and well-organized criminals. We will see organizations taking advantage of highly-available solutions, such as hyperconvergence and edge computing, that allow them to not only keep up with changing consumer demands, but deploy the most effective cyber defences, disaster recovery, and backup.
The way organizations approach the aftermath of data being corrupted will likely change too, as insurance companies will begin to take an active role, not just in the recovery of data, but in the decision making when it comes to whether or not to pay the ransom demand. The overall cost of doing business will rise in conjunction with the growing threat of cyber-attacks, and every business should be bracing themselves for the impact.”
Shahar Ben Hador, VP, Product Management, Exabeam
“As organizations adopt a cloud-first approach and adversaries look to more aggressively target data stored this way, on-premises security information and event management tools will become outdated and dangerous, particularly for short-staffed security teams. Further, with organizations around the world capitalizing on the cloud, security risks will increase along with a complex array of compliance and policy requirements for in-region hosting.
Therefore, in 2020, a greater need for SaaS-based SIEM solutions will emerge. These tools will change cloud security by minimizing the operational burdens for SOC employees while significantly improving how fast they can catch suspicious, anomalous behavior within cloud applications. We are likely to see the security companies behind these tools rise to the occasion, by expediting global expansion and including data encryption, consistent third-party penetration testing, and SOC 2 Type II compliance in cloud solution portfolios.”
Shahar Ben Hador, VP, Product Management, Exabeam
“At a high level, SaaS apps have highly tailored needs when it comes to information security and protecting customer data, and will require guidance and prioritization from product teams. Implementing these InfoSec needs will require the expertise of the security team, as well as resources of the engineering team, which are allocated by the product teams.
Therefore, I predict that DevSecOps will merge into engineering and be guided by product. Currently, this is from an operational point of view due to the proximity to DevOps’ technical capabilities. However, I see it as a strong business need that requires product and customer knowledge, to keep up with the increasing complexity of SaaS apps and the sensitive data these apps can access.”
Setu Kulkarni, VP, Strategy and Business Development, WhiteHat Security
“The industry will start to ‘think right to shift left.’
There are more apps in production than before, and the risk of apps being breached at this stage is at an all-time high.
Apps in production are most vulnerable, with a higher time to fix and window of exposure. Plus, with most development teams short on resources, it’s often hard for them to focus on the security aspect. Therefore, these apps are easy for hackers to exploit. In fact, an average of more than 50% of apps are always vulnerable for organizations that don’t have the right secure development practices in place.
When you ‘think right’ you are:
- Starting with highest-risk apps in production to find and fix vulnerabilities
- Incorporating security measures at the most critical points in the software lifecycle (SLC), starting with production
- Integrating security throughout the SLC from production all the way to development
In 2020, we will see this approach being adopted more widely.”
Trevor Bidle, information security and compliance officer, US Signal
“DDoS and other attacks on websites or applications show no signs of abating. According to a recent State of Web and DDoS Attacks survey, 83 percent of organizations have experienced a DDoS attack within the last two years. If that wasn’t bad enough, 81 percent have experienced a cyberattack on their website or web applications in the same timeframe.
Cyberattacks will continue to grow in breadth, scale, imagination and complexity. Sometimes they are perpetrated by ‘hacktivists’ that disagree with an organization’s corporate stance on an issue or its wider ethical position. Sometimes attacks are state-sponsored-designed to wreak havoc and chaos and destabilize entire governments. However, the majority are still carried out by computer geeks trying to outsmart the latest cyber protection technology or opportunists looking to make a quick buck. Whatever the motivation, one thing is for sure; you don’t want your organization to become a victim. Now more than ever, businesses need to prepare and protect themselves.
Traditionally, resource-strapped technical teams have been most likely to seek managed service provider help and assistance with their cybersecurity strategy. However, in 2020, companies that were previously confident in their preparations will likely be looking for third-party support too. This situation has come about because of the increasingly complex and pernicious nature of DDoS and website or application attacks-and a desperate wish not to be the next headline in a national newspaper.
Whether you choose an in-house or managed cybersecurity strategy, it’s essential to act now. Organizations need to remain vigilant. Well-tested and frequently updated software, system architecture, and playbooks are all critical. That way, you can be ready in case that fateful day ever comes.”
Joseph Feiman, chief strategy officer, WhiteHat Security
“By 2022, governments, organizations and individuals will realize their failure to protect 100% of their owned/handled information. They will begin limiting protection down to the most valuable 25%, while placing the rest into fully/partially open access.
The volume of information grows exponentially year over year. But even the existing volume cannot be effectively protected: examples of which are ubiquitous.
Existing and evolving security technology are complex (e.g. network and application firewalls, IDS/IPS, DLP, etc.). They are not (and cannot be) managed effectively across the global maze of information, which is in the hands of governments, organizations and individuals.
But is it really necessary to protect all the information? The society is moving toward greater openness and broadly sharing information, including data that just a few years/decades ago was considered most sensitive. Sharing takes place via a wide variety of professional and social networks and public media. Governments are under social pressure to open more information as well.
This combination of the: 1) growing volume of information, 2) complexity and ineffectiveness of protection technologies, and 3) growing openness, will lead to the realization that: A) it is impossible to protect it all, B) there is no need to protect it all.
Governments, organizations and individuals should realize that protection of all information is unrealistic, and the battle for it has been lost (actually, the victory has never been possible).
They should explore their ability to protect somewhere around 25% of the information they own/handle. For that, they have to select the subset of the most valuable information that is worth protection and that is feasible to protect. They should be gradually, over the years, placing the remaining 75% of the information in the fully/partially open access realm.”
Richard Cassidy, senior director, Security Strategy at Exabeam
“2020 should herald a true golden age of ‘deep learning’, which will see a resurgence of artificial intelligence (AI) embedded into the fabric of our securitySTEM D frameworks. Expect to see some exciting machine learning (ML) developments in the seemingly ‘ad infinitum’ war on cyber threats and bad actor group attack circuits.
Security focus will move away from the tired alerting methodology we’ve all painfully relied on for far too long, to a far more ‘risk context’ approach, combining data-classification, trust modelling and security analytics functions.
We’re already seeing almost all security vendors scramble to jump on the AI band-wagon, with those who managed to book early now trying to differentiate with new waves of ML algorithms, offering more enhanced ways to detect the ‘unknown unknowns’. That said, however, security practices should pay heed to the fact that AI is not all about the new and ultimately unfathomable. It’s about enabling organisations to do far more with what they have, super-charging existing security and GRC functions – not least hyper-enabling already over-stretched teams – to focus on doing more of what they enjoy and innovating for the betterment of business outcomes.”
Steve Moore, chief security strategist, Exabeam
“The chief information security officer (CISO) is among the most coveted leadership positions in the security industry, and as with other roles in the space, we’ll continue to see the role evolve in 2020. This progress is indicative of how organizations are approaching cybersecurity, with many still determining how to optimize their efforts. More enlightened teams are not approaching security as just a preventative business function – they assume its broader role in business success – whether for customer acquisition, retention, or other critical factors.
As part of this, we’ll see CISOs seek out relationships to advance security and enable other leaders, teams, and departments have success beyond protecting digital assets. With an increasingly critical role in meeting diverse needs across an organization, CISOs will benefit from an established foundation that broadens the value and impact of cybersecurity. This foundation will be heavily tested in the years ahead.
Therefore in 2020, I recommend a combined focus for CISOs on three distinct disciplines: friendliness, relevance and firm accountability. The ‘friendly CISO’ will never allow his/her program to prohibit future conversations about solutions or risks; the ‘relevant CISO’ will ensure they’ve built a program that ‘trains like it fights’ and doesn’t allow compliance to deter security; and finally, an ‘accountable CISO’ holds others accountable too – starting at the top of the org chart. This approach means the CISO cannot be a proverbial punching bag. Instead, they can articulate how they intend to run a program, for example, as a business leader first, with all the associated accountability for themselves and others, and a security leader second.”
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