By the end of April, it was evident that COVID-19 had permanently altered the future of work.
So much so that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, while delivering the quarterly earnings report to Wall Street, said “we’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”
As Microsoft Security General Manager Andrew Conway reports, a major catalyst for such a dramatic advancement of DX was the importance of cybersecurity in ensuring productive remote work.
For context, in late 2019 we reported on the global surge in spending on cybersecurity products and services — then expected to exceed $1 trillion cumulatively over the five-year period from 2017 to 2021.
Related Reading: How enterprises are facing security challenges
COVID’s impact
To better understand the pandemic’s role in shaping cybersecurity for the long-term, Microsoft surveyed nearly 800 business leaders of companies with over 500 employees in India, Germany, the UK, and the US. The results show that organizations are still impacted by phishing scams and security budgets, that hiring increased in response to COVID-19, and that investment is going into cloud-based technologies and architectures.
(Image via Microsoft)
At the top of the list of challenges reported by leaders surveyed is “Providing secure remote access to resources, apps, and data.”
“For many businesses,” Conway explains, “the limits of the trust model they had been using, which leaned heavily on company-managed devices, physical access to buildings, and limited remote access to select line-of-business apps, got exposed early on in the pandemic.”
Unsurprisingly, surveyed leaders identified that the top security investment made during the pandemic was multi-factor authentication.
Additional insights from the survey include:
- Anti-phishing technology was most identified as the best pre-pandemic security investment, with phishing threats cited as the biggest risk to security.
- 90% of indicating that phishing attacks have impacted their organization.
- A majority of leaders surveyed reported budget increases for security (58%) and compliance (65%).
- 81% also report feeling pressure to lower overall security costs.
- “Business leaders from organizations with resources mostly on-premises are especially likely to feel budget pressure, with roughly 1/3rd feeling ‘very pressured.’”
- 40% say they are prioritizing investments in Cloud Security, followed by Data & Information Security (28%), and anti-phishing tools (26%).
Conway also identified five ways the pandemic is changing the cybersecurity landscape for the long-term:
- “Security has proven to be the foundation for digital empathy in a remote workforce during the pandemic”
- A top priority of those surveyed is improving end-user experience and productivity while working remotely (41%).
- The Zero Trust model will become industry standard
- 51% of business leaders are expediting the deployment of Zero Trust capabilities — a security model based on strict access controls where the default is to not trust anyone both inside or outside the perimeter.
- 94% of companies report that they are in the process of deploying new Zero Trust capabilities to some extent.
- The importance of diverse data for improved Threat Intelligence
- “Microsoft tracked more than 8 trillion daily threat signals from a diverse set of products, services, and feeds around the globe.”
- The absolute necessity of cyber resilience to business operations
- “Cybersecurity provides the underpinning to operationally resiliency as more organizations enable secure remote work options.”
- Maintaining this requires regular evaluation of risk threshold and the deployment of cyber resilience processes.
- “The cloud is a security imperative”
- Integrated security solutions are crucial for organizations of all sizes.
