The devastating impacts of cyberattacks on a business's ability to operate will become more severe in the future for organizations that fail to treat cybersecurity as a business investment.
That's the message Gartner's top eight cybersecurity predictions released today have for the world's CISOs, CIOs and security and risk management leaders. It's a sobering reminder for the many IT and cybersecurity teams who continue to be overwhelmed by remote work, hybrid cloud integration and digital transformation projects, that the threat landscape is changing faster than most organizations can react.
What Gartner's predictions are saying
Together, Gartner's top eight cybersecurity predictions warn organizations that they need to employ greater resilience to reduce the impact of more severe cyberattacks. Reducing the blast radius of larger, more potentially devastating attacks is key.
Implied in the predictions is advice to focus not just on ransomware or any other currently trending type of cyberattack, but to prioritize cybersecurity investments as core to managing risks and see them as investments in the business. By 2025, 60% of organizations will use cybersecurity risk as a primary determinant in conducting third-party transactions and business engagements, according to Gartner's predictions.
Doubling down with greater resilience across every threat surface is key. For example, while Gartner mentions zero-trust network access (ZTNA) in just one of the eight predictions, the core concepts of ZTNA and its benefits are reflected in most of the predictions. The predictions also note that investing in preventative controls is not enough, and that there needs to be a much higher priority placed on resilience. This is because threat surfaces grow faster than many organizations can gain visibility to and protect.
By 2025, it is expected that 80% of enterprises will adopt a strategy to unify web, cloud services and private application access from a single vendor's secured service edge (SSE) platform. ZTNA is one of the core technologies enabling SSE platforms. For additional information on SSE and SASE's (secure access service edge) relationship to ZTNA, as well as an insightful view of the market, please see the 2022 Gartner Market Guide for Zero Trust Network Access, courtesy of Absolute Software.
The following are Gartner's top eight cybersecurity predictions for 2022-2023:
Resiliency in tech stacks
Together, the eight cybersecurity predictions are useful for CIOs, CISOs and their teams to start thinking about how they're doing to become more resilient and redefine their tech stacks to handle entirely new types of attacks. Cybersecurity becomes a business decision when CISOs have their pay indexed to risk management. That's a step in the right direction of seeing resilience as a core business strength to be improved.