Cyber-threats are set to become more sophisticated in 2023. This means that businesses need to become more data-centric. To gain an insight into how businesses responses are likely to become stronger as the year unfolds, Digital Journal caught up with Shira Shamban, CEO and Co-Founder of cloud security company Solvo.
Shamban is well-qualified to provide the predictions, holding 17 years of experience in security and cloud computing engineering. Prior to co-founding Solvo, Shamban formed the technical security research team and the big data product at Dome9 Security.
Increase in incidents
Cybersecurity incidents are likely to increase, notes Shamban: “In 2023, we can expect to see an increase in volume of security incidents as a result of the expanding attack surface, a trend that has shown no signs of decline in past years. This past year, we have seen wide adoption and scale of infrastructures in the cloud; however, efforts to protect this new attack surface matched the need. According to previous IBM research, there was a 25 percent increase in security incidents response teams engaged with from 2020 to 2021.”
Cloud native breaches
Some of these cybersecurity issues will be specific. Shamban predicts: “Not only will we see a rise in security incidents overall, but specifically, a rise in cloud native breaches. According to 2022 research, nearly half of all data breaches occurred in the cloud. As companies continue to migrate parts or entire infrastructures to the cloud, we will see an increase in the amount of data and crown jewels stored in the cloud, leading to more opportunities for cloud-native security incidents. Applications must be built in a way where third parties can be trusted. Because this supply chain isn’t secure, hacking in the cloud holds a lot of growing value in the eyes of cyber attackers.”
Data-led approaches to incidents
As cyberattacks become more sophisticated, so must the responses. Shamban observes: “Cybersecurity often focuses on reacting to threats. And even when security and development teams introduce secure coding practices into the build phases of the software development lifecycle, the focus tends to be on hardening applications, servers or network firewalls. In 2023, we are going to see a data-centric approach to cybersecurity emerge and grow. At its core, cybersecurity is a problem of managing all the data, assets and sensitive resources an organization has, and determining how to protect it. This sensitive data can often include PII, PHI or IP. This is the top concern of CISOs and security practitioners, so security approaches and products will begin to put data at the center, rather than focusing solely on the environments the data is in.”
Identify-centric models
With another approach, Shamban sums this up as: “Along with seeing a data-centric approach to security emerge, we will also see an identity-centric model grow. In previous years, when infrastructures were entirely on-premises, the network used to be the security perimeter. However, in today’s cloud-native era and with the growth of APIs, it’s necessary to have strong Identity and Access Management practices throughout the organization, creating a unique identity not only for each individual employee but also for the specific cloud components, such as containers, serverless functions and data resources. Maintaining a least-privileged state at scale will be increasingly important.”
Automation
Automation will be important in 2023, especially to address personnel shortages. Shamban outlines: “The cybersecurity industry has grappled with the need for more security practitioners to manage the rising attack surface and migration to the cloud. Unfortunately, we’re not seeing this number increase to keep up with the need. Because of this, we will need more help from automation to remediate and prevent security incidents. Automation cannot fully replace the security function; however, in 2023, we can expect to see automation continue to take over time-intensive tasks that will free up our human resources to deal with more complex threats. This trend will drive organizations to create software that will complement security teams and help them accomplish their goals.”
