Preparing for the Cybersecurity Renaissance

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We are entering an era where our current cybersecurity and privacy policy decisions will have a lasting impact on future generations. As citizens, organizations and countries continue to become digital, the cost of cyber attacks continues to grow exponentially. From losing one’s life savings, to stolen intellectual property, to national security; many have been forced by the gravity of the situation to look multiple years out and reevaluate their current cybersecurity readiness. With this cross community focus on cybersecurity, there has been a renewal of learning in the space that has been unmatched in previous years, a cybersecurity renaissance if you will. These learnings have manifested themselves in the form of emerging compliance regulations, technology advancements and cybersecurity education programs.

Cybersecurity Compliance Regulations

As governments continue to tighten regulations on industries in order to protect their citizens from cyber attacks, policies such as the Cybersecurity Act in the USA and the General Data Protection Regulation in the EU have been put in place. While these policies are a great foundation, there is still much to be desired. For instance, a key area of the Cybersecurity Act is threat indicator sharing (e.g. suspicious IP addresses). While threat indicator sharing is a great start, it only gives organizations a partial backwards looking view of a single threat. In order to become proactive, organizations need to extend their sharing capabilities to behavioral analysis. This will enable them to find future threats that exhibit a similar suspicious behavior while not matching a specific suspicious IP, for example.

Technology Advancements

While cybersecurity application providers have made technology advancement in recent years, it still remains difficult for organizations to have a complete comprehensive view of their organization because of technology and budget constraints. This results in enterprises drawing an artificial box around high-valued applications or data sources leaving areas of the enterprise exposed. As we look forward, this strategy simply won’t work as the edges of the enterprise continue to extend and blur with cloud and IoT, and more sophisticated attackers take advantage of these new openings. These inevitable external environmental changes will require organizations to monitor +100s of billions of events a day while leveraging advanced anomaly detection and artificial intelligence to complement human oversight.

Cybersecurity Educational Programs

The massive need for cybersecurity professionals has put a strain on the community. Finding the right talent that possesses the necessary skills, beyond that of an entry-level analyst, has become a massive challenge for many. This has forced enterprises and governments to outsource many of their cybersecurity operations to managed service providers such as Accenture and/or Cloudwick. The UK government has even gone so far as to implement a cybersecurity bursary scheme which gives approved applicants an annual scholarship of £4,000 to pay for their studies, as long as they work for them post education. The UK understands that this skills gap is a critical piece of the puzzle and have made sure that this scholarship was integrated into their overall UK Cybersecurity Strategy.

While progress has been made, we still have a long ways to go. These next few years will continue to become increasingly critical as the world continues to learn about the new world of cybersecurity. During this time, it’s critical to organization that they do their best to future proof their current cybersecurity strategy. Whether they do that by examining the ever evolving and advancing open source technology ecosystem (ONI as one example), investing in employee training, or learning more about the emerging compliance regulations, they need to ensure that today’s decisions stand the test of time.

TJLaherContributed by: TJ Laher, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager, Cybersecurity at Cloudera. After graduating from UC Berkeley TJ found himself working with a variety of disruptive technology companies in the bay area launching products, positioning products, and growing companies through data driven marketing techniques. Before Cloudera, TJ worked with an early stage advanced analytics startup called Ayasdi. While at Ayasdi, he had the opportunity to help Fortune 500 companies mine high dimensional data to deploy novel big data applications. After having worked with these companies, TJ has seen first hand how intelligent use of data will have a positive and long lasting impact on organizations and societies around the world.

 

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