The global pandemic has fueled a rapid digital transformation — and led to permanent shifts in cybersecurity. In a recent joint webinar with Bryan McAninch, senior solutions engineer at Splunk, and guest speaker Chris Kissel from IDC, "Sp(e)lunking Security with MITRE ATT&CK® featuring IDC Research," they shared seven overarching trends in cybersecurity for 2021. One notable, but foundational, trend mentioned was the need to understand risk.

The job of IT admins and IT security analysts are, without a doubt, some of the most important jobs in any company. When things are running smoothly, it is easy for everyone to forget they exist. However, the moment things go askew, everyone points fingers at them. IT security professionals are expected to know everything. Most of them are self-taught and have learned on-the-job. Over time, experience has turned them into battle-hardened soldiers.

There is no shortage of IT cloud software services out there for businesses to choose from. Regardless of their business needs you can be sure there will be a myriad of solutions. Instead of a few grand does-it-all services, IT has become a swarm of inter-playing, inter-operating, and interconnecting services. It’s no surprise that services like zapier and IFTTT are thriving in this ecosystem where they can become the glue and automate the gap between them. The future is surely bright.

When approached by stakeholders in their organization, few security teams can confidently demonstrate that logging and alerting capabilities are working as expected. Organizations have become more distributed and reliant on cloud offerings for use cases such as identity and access management, user productivity, and file storage. Meanwhile, adversaries have extended their operational capabilities in cloud environments.

It’s been a stressful year, to say the least, for the government and education sector. Government organizations were challenged with pivoting their operations to a digital model while schools were forced to decide between hybrid or remote learning programs for their students. The rise of digital operations has made application security (AppSec) more important than ever.

We at Netskope Threat Labs have published a series of blogs detailing the misconfigurations in cloud apps causing data exposure. Misconfiguration and sensitive data exposure have been listed as predominant top 10 OWASP security risks for years, and are now also the predominant cause of cloud data breaches.

2020 will always be remembered as the year our lives changed dramatically due to the Coivd-19 pandemic. Here our panel of security experts look back at the lessons learned in the past 12 months and share their predictions for the key security challenges organizations will face in 2021.