The new year in cybersecurity is likely to feature at least one old problem – shortages of skilled cyber professionals – but also progress in areas like zero trust security, cloud adoption, and continued adoption of enterprise IT approaches.
Those are the top-line takeaways from officials at cloud security provider Zscaler, who gave MeriTalk a look ahead at 2023.
On the cyber workforce front, “cyber security teams are already stretched thin across the federal and public sector organizations,” said Danny Connolly, CISO Americas at Zscaler.
“In 2023, cyber security professionals on the front lines will have to make tough decisions on where they apply their limited resources and the initiatives they are engaged in and find a balance that works while focusing on responding to emerging threats,” he said. “This will ultimately continue to drive cloud delivered security solutions and managed services in an attempt to maximize and offload resource constrained teams.”
Connolly said government and private-sector organizations will continue to look to Federal standards as they shift to zero trust security architectures, saying that the zero trust maturity model published by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) will become “the de facto standard” for both market sectors.
Telework models are likely to persist in the new year, he said, due to concerns over a resurgence in the coronavirus, and an economic downturn. Because of those, Connolly said, “organizations will continue leverage the work from anywhere model which drives the importance of implementing security solutions that follow the user instead of what network they are connected to.”
At the network level, Patrick Perry, Zscaler’s Senior Director of Federal Strategic Initiatives, said he is looking for “more emphasis on ‘enterprise solutions’ that enable the usage of emerging technologies like cloud, etc., that will force smaller government organizations to adopt and ‘manage their portion’ of the enterprise approach.”
“Evaluating capabilities that accomplish many strategic initiatives, while adapting them against one problem at a time without re-architecting an organization’s environment, will start becoming the most sought-after differentiator,” Perry said.
