Topic: What COVID-19 Taught Us: Prepping Cybersecurity for the Next Crisis
Few could have anticipated the impact COVID-19 has had on business. It spread from an isolated outbreak to a global pandemic seemingly overnight, and IT leaders across the planet have had mixed success adjusting to the changes and uncertainty it has brought.
While COVID-19 caught many businesses off guard, smart executives are already thinking about the next global crisis and what challenges it might present for IT security.
Climate Change: A Looming Crisis
It’s a good bet that climate change could bring forth the sequel to COVID-19. Global climate change is once again the top threat globally according to Pew Research (not surprisingly, cyberattacks are a close second), and it typically occupies top rankings on similar doomsday lists. The World Economic Forum did not include pandemic or contagious disease on its 2019 list of Top 10 Global Risks By Likelihood, but climate change dominated the top three — extreme weather events, failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation, and major natural disasters like earthquakes or volcanoes.
Climate change is particularly problematic for IT because it affects confidentiality, integrity and availability — the three pillars of information security — and requires a holistic strategy.
Availability is threatened by the physical nature of climate change that forces people away from home or office and the spiraling demand for resources. Confidentiality and integrity become problematic when considering the newest technologies that organizations are implementing as part of digital transformation. Security concerns should be a leading factor when considering and deploying new technology solutions.
Pandemic Provides Sound Guidance for the Next Crisis
We’re all still learning the lessons of COVID-19, and going forward they must be held closely, as many potential climate-change outcomes could mirror what we’ve experienced since March 2020. Wildfires or flooding from supersized or rare storms, events that have intensified in recent years, would bring mass evacuations and services disruptions that drive employees to work from home and businesses to establish secure connections in order to maintain productivity.
Working from home and increased cloud adoption pose challenges and risks that must be faced proactively. Since fixed locations and the legacy hardware they’re connected to are increasingly vulnerable, a user-centric approach to security infrastructure, like a software-defined network, is required.
There is increasing chatter around the importance of data backup in 2021, and how automated backup and disaster recovery (BDR) will be an emerging mission-critical component of data security. Considering how working from home figures to continue driving the emergence of both multi-cloud and disaster recovery as-a-service (DRaaS) (expected to grow at 41.6 percent CAGR through 2027), it’s safe to say most organizations will be focused on BDR.
Topic Discussed: What COVID-19 Taught Us: Prepping Cybersecurity for the Next Crisis