The cyber security space is still on the way to recovery from the ill effects of covid-19. It is not easy to predict how a post-pandemic security space would be. The enormous amounts of uncertainty involved may make things worse as far as securing post-covid networks is concerned.
When uncertainty strikes, organizations can be highly conservative and intolerant towards risks. Yet, security would be under immense scrutiny across all enterprises in the future.
There is enhanced visibility into transactions and dealings within the networks in a hybrid digital space that supports extensive remote work. Hackers have a comparatively easier time in the post-pandemic world. As the trackback to normality becomes more evident, organizations need to begin securing those changes before adapting to the changed technical requirements and challenges.
In the pre-covid times, work from home was not as common as today. The LANs and WANs were highly secured, along with the office laptops/desktops. Sophisticated technologies were in place which could offer total protection. IT experts faced familiar scenarios to deal with. The majority of the technical issues were commonly occurring. However, the post-covid times are going to be strikingly different, with work from home culture dominating the cyber security arena.
Securing post-covid networks would be mostly about tackling the concerns associated with the work-from-home culture.
Secure VPN access is often enabled for employees during remote work. However, the first interface for the desktop or laptop is a broadband network, or shared wireless, or even a mobile hotspot. As a result, these devices are less likely to be totally safe, and these devices have rudimentary security.
The extent of cloud adoption was beyond expectations during the pandemic. Moreover, the sudden and enormous shift to cloud paved the way for new security concerns which were not adequately tackled during the early days of the pandemic.
As enterprises suddenly moved organizational data away from data centers and to the cloud security, controls were not given adequate consideration. As a result, security has been a conventional roadblock to cloud adoption. Also, organizations would need to reconsider security aspects that were previously ignored from now on.
The ever-increasing cloud adoption in the hybrid environment creates a challenging situation wherein it is impossible to prevent data from getting transferred to places.
Consequently, it would be a massive challenge for enterprises in 2022 to track and sort that data wherever it moves or stays. Another challenge would be to predict possible threats to this data and take appropriate action.
The cybersecurity budget may be another constraint in the coming year. A recent report by the 451 Research highlighted the need for urgent improvements in the allocated funding for cyber security. In some of the cases, budgets allocated were as low as 8 %. The report was titled’ Voice of the Enterprise: Information Security, Organizational Dynamics.’ Unfortunately, the ratio between the attack’s impact and the budget allocated was hardly satisfactory in most cases.