As 2024 fast approaches, organisations are looking back on the past year to try and gain some insight into what the next 12 months could hold. This past year has been particularly interesting in the world of cyber security, with ransomware and data breaches dominating the headlines, the rise to prominence of AI strengthening cybercrime's arsenal, and the shift of focus to cyber resilience causing businesses to question what comes next for the industry.

For security professionals across organisations of all sizes we anticipate the following issues will be a key focus for the year ahead:

Increased focus on cyber resilience

With the reality that every organisation will almost inevitably suffer a cyber-attack at some point, the ability to recover with the least amount of downtime and data loss will be a priority. Organisations are coming around to the harsh reality that focusing on cybersecurity that centres on preventing attacks is not infallible. The ability to quickly recover from an attack, while minimising the impact on the organisation will be a strategic objective.

The cyber skill shortage will continue

The shortage of talent with the necessary knowledge and skills to protect organisations from cyber threats continues to be an ongoing concern. According to the 2023 ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study, the cybersecurity workforce has grown by 8.7%, but the gap between the number of workers needed to the number of available openings grew 12.6% year on year. This indicates that growth in the number of cybersecurity roles is still outpacing talent pool growth.

Increasingly sophisticated phishing and social engineering attacks

Malicious actors will continue to up their game when it comes to manipulating users through social engineering. Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables these bad actors to carry out more intelligent and personalised phishing campaigns against their unwitting victims. In addition, deepfake technology is continuing to advance, making it increasingly more difficult to discern whether something such as an image or video is real.

Increased focus on cybersecurity by corporate boards

Cybersecurity is increasingly recognised as a business risk, becoming a strategic priority for organisations. Coupling this with the trend toward board members having explicit accountability for cybersecurity necessitates an increased focus by corporate boards. By 2026, Gartner predicts that 70% of boards will include one member with cybersecurity expertise.

Increased adoption of Zero Trust Frameworks through ZTNA and SASE

With the ever growing remote and mobile workforce, coupled with application sprawl across on prem, public cloud and SaaS, organisations are finding it hard to maintain secure, consistent, and performant policy across their remote users and applications. 

Leveraging Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) allows an organisation to extrapolate their access layer from their data centre, allowing users to ingress to the closest onramp wherever they are in the world. Through a single interface, organisations can granularly control application, network and internet access while enhancing security protection such as secure web gateway and browser isolation. 

Couple the ability to prevent malicious scripts with the ability to onramp to clouds, enforce data loss prevention, and secure inbound application traffic through reverse proxy, web application firewall and DDoS protection, more companies will most likely be moving to centralised ZTNA and SASE designs in 2024.

Ultimately, as threat actors gear up to use the new technologies that are at their disposal, companies will be exploring ways to stay a step ahead while preparing to withstand potential breaches and attacks with minimal downtime.

ABOUT 11:11 SYSTEMS

11:11 Systems is a managed infrastructure solutions provider that holistically addresses the challenges of next-generation managed cloud, connectivity and security requirements. The 11:11 model empowers customers and partners to "Rethink Connected," which includes integrated services that deliver increased performance, optimization and savings. Learn more at 1111Systems.com.