In the opening keynote at the recent Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in Sydney, Richard Addiscott, Senior Director Analyst and Rob McMillan, Managing Vice President at Gartner discussed Gartner’s predictions for how the cyber risk and resilience landscape will develop.
Gartner recommends that cyber security leaders build the following strategic planning assumptions into their security strategies for the next two years:
Through 2023, government regulations requiring organizations to provide consumer privacy rights will cover 5 billion citizens and more than 70 percent of global GDP.
As of 2021, almost 3 billion individuals had access to consumer privacy rights across 50 countries, and privacy regulation continues to expand. Gartner recommends that organizations track subject rights request metrics, including cost per request and time to fulfill, to identify inefficiencies and justify accelerated automation.
By 2025, 80 percent of enterprises will adopt a strategy to unify web, cloud services and private application access from a single vendor’s SSE platform.
With a hybrid workforce and data everywhere accessible by everything, vendors are offering an integrated security service edge (SSE) solution to deliver consistent and simple web, private access and SaaS application security. Single-vendor solutions provide significant operational efficiency and security effectiveness compared with best-of-breed solutions, including tighter integration, fewer consoles to use, and fewer locations where data must be decrypted, inspected and re-encrypted.
60 percent of organizations will embrace zero trust as a starting point for security by 2025. More than half will fail to realize the benefits.
The term zero trust is now prevalent in security vendor marketing and in security guidance from governments. As a mindset — replacing implicit trust with identity- and context-based risk appropriate trust — it is extremely powerful. However, as zero trust is both a security principle and an organizational vision, it requires a cultural shift and clear communication that ties it to business outcomes to achieve the benefits.
By 2025, 60 percent of organizations will use cyber security risk as a primary determinant in conducting third-party transactions and business engagements.
Cyber attacks related to third parties are increasing. However, only 23 percent of security and risk leaders monitor third parties in real time for cyber security exposure, according to Gartner data. As a result of consumer concerns and interest from regulators, Gartner believes organizations will start to mandate cyber security risk as a significant determinant when conducting business with third parties, ranging from simple monitoring of a critical technology supplier to complex due diligence for mergers and acquisitions.
Through 2025, 30 percent of nation states will pass legislation that regulates ransomware payments, fines and negotiations, up from less than 1 percent in 2021.
Modern ransomware gangs now steal data as well as encrypt it. The decision to pay the ransom or not is a business-level decision, not a security one. Gartner recommends engaging a professional incident response team as well as law enforcement and any regulatory body before negotiating.
By 2025, threat actors will have weaponized operational technology environments successfully to cause human casualties.
Attacks on OT – hardware and software that monitors or controls equipment, assets and processes – have become more common and more disruptive. In operational environments, security and risk management leaders should be more concerned about real world hazards to humans and the environment, rather than information theft, according to Gartner.
By 2025, 70 percent of CEOs will mandate a culture of organizational resilience to survive coinciding threats from cybercrime, severe weather events, civil unrest and political instabilities.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the inability of traditional business continuity management planning to support the organization’s response to a large-scale disruption. With continued disruption likely, Gartner recommends that risk leaders recognize organizational resilience as a strategic imperative and build an organization-wide resilience strategy that also engages staff, stakeholders, customers, and suppliers.
By 2026, 50 percent of C-level executives will have performance requirements related to risk built into their employment contracts.
Most boards now regard cyber security as a business risk rather than solely a technical IT problem, according to a recent Gartner survey. As a result, Gartner expects to see a shift in formal accountability for the treatment of cyber risks from the security leader to senior business leaders.
