COVID-19 made moving agency employees and services off-premises essential. This move, however, has also sparked one of the biggest waves of cybercrime the internet has ever seen. Ransomware attacks have been particularly effective against government agencies and critical infrastructure.
Here’s the reality: hybrid and remote work are here to stay. This means access to your corporate data can now come from anywhere, on any device and any network. In order to tackle this new norm, Gartner has defined a new cybersecurity framework called Secure Access Service Edge (SASE).
The complexity of cybersecurity threats has increased over the years. Additionally, the number of attack surfaces that can be used by cybercriminals has expanded phenomenally with the rise in remote and hybrid workplace models. With such a wide scope of possible cyberthreats, there’s no single solution that can counter them all.
Zero Trust…it’s probably one of the biggest IT buzzwords in the last decade. While it seems that every vendor claims to be an enforcer of zero trust, there is value behind the concept if you can cut through the marketing haze. One of the greatest areas of value is around enabling hybrid work for employees. Remote work and hybrid work have extended the corporate world to every home, and user device. The workforce must access wherever they are, from whatever device is in front of them.
As we look ahead to 2022, we should pause to reflect on the trends of the past year. Ransomware and supply chain attacks have become two of the top concerns for organizations following a series of high-profile attacks, such as those conducted against Colonial Pipeline, SolarWinds and Kaseya. In 2021, our Project Memoria revealed close to 100 different vulnerabilities in common TCP/IP stacks, affecting hundreds of operational technology (OT) vendors.
Executive Order 14028 on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity was released in May with nine sections outlining specific focus areas for security improvements. As we noted at the time, Netskope applauded the EO for how it placed significant emphasis on zero trust security adoption, mentioning it no fewer than 11 times, and insisting on proactive action.
