Predicting that generative AI (genAI) for visual content, genAI for language, TuringBots, and IoT security will be the four technologies that deliver the most immediate ROI in two years, Forrester’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies In 2024 reflects the urgency more businesses have for making AI pay while securing their most at-risk endpoints.
Rounding out Forrester’s ten emerging technologies are AI agents, autonomous mobility, edge intelligence, quantum security, extended reality (XR), and Zero Trust Edge (ZTE).
Forrester’s stack ranking of technologies by ROI potential
Advising clients to include ten emerging technologies on their radar and roadmap, Forrester has segmented them into short-term, medium-, and long-term groups based on their potential to deliver ROI. Three of the ten emerging technologies are cybersecurity related.
Technologies predicted to deliver the most significant ROI over the next two years
GenAI for visual content and language. Given how quickly genAI’s adoption is accelerating across enterprises via a myriad of cloud-based apps and tools, especially in marketing, digital design, and communications, it’s clear why Forrester predicted that genAI for visual content, genAI for language have the potential to deliver ROI in two years. Forrester notes that “genAI for language is already delivering value in customer support and content creation but continues to advance at a blinding pace. It is accelerating many other technologies as it goes.”
TuringBots are predicted to accelerate app development. The report states that these AI-powered software robots “help developers build applications that deliver more than just code generation” thanks to advancements in genAI for language. TuringBots are defined as “AI-powered software that augments application development teams’ automation and semiautonomous capabilities to plan, analyze, design, code, test, deliver, and deploy while providing assistive intelligence on code, development processes, and applications.”
IoT Security to secure the proliferating number and variety of endpoint devices. Forrester defines IoT security technology as including components that are “familiar to endpoint management and security: asset management, identity and access management (IAM), data security management, Zero Trust networking, and attack surface risk management.” Forrester predicts that deploying IoT security solutions will deliver expected business value within a year as vendors increasingly offer capabilities as part of other cybersecurity platforms.
Source: Forrester’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies In 2024
Emerging technologies predicted to deliver ROI in two to five years
AI agents. Forrester is seeing AI agent technology stacks include advanced deep learning techniques, including generative, predictive, and reinforcement learning, that enable greater context, analysis, strategy, and planning. Forrester believes their full realization is two to five years away, predicting that “organizations with large amounts of information and sizable human workforces will likely see the biggest and most immediate benefits.”
Autonomous mobility. Manufacturing and logistics are two industries shifting workloads from initial pilots into production, according to Forrester. Both industries are facing continued labor shortages, regulatory pressures, and rising costs and see the potential to improve traffic and supply chain management results. Key benefits include greater operational efficiencies across shop floors, improved regulatory compliance, enhanced worker productivity and safety, and more accurate data to track environmental sustainability efforts.
Edge intelligence. Edge intelligence, according to Forrester, is “the ability to collect data, make assumptions based on that data, and link that data to relevant, distributed, orchestrated, and contextually driven responses in a network of application, device, and communication ecosystems.” The report further defines the tech stack for edge intelligence as including streaming analytics, edge ML, federated ML, and real-time data management on intelligent devices and edge servers.
Quantum security. Reducing the risk of “harvest now, decrypt later” quantum attacks, providing increased cryptographic agility for the future, and improving digital signatures are a few of the many benefits quantum security delivers. Asymmetric and symmetric key generation, symmetric key distribution via QKD, digital signatures and certificate management, and keeping an accurate list of cryptographic algorithms are some of the most common uses. These benefits and use cases form the basis of Forrestter’s assigning quantum security into the mid-segment of their stack ranking.
Source: Forrester’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies In 2024
Emerging technologies predicted to deliver ROI in over five years
Extended reality (XR). Forrester defines XR as “a technology that overlays computer imagery on a user’s field of vision, with augmented reality (AR), mixed reality, and virtual reality (VR) technologies that are supported by the same developer tools, sensors, cameras, and simulation engines.” Their report notes that only 8% of US online adults own a virtual-reality headset, and just 16% have used an augmented-reality device or app. While XR is advancing in training and onboarding, companies are resisting investing in tools like these until they see broad adoption.
Zero Trust Edge (ZTE). ZTE technology has the potential to protect remote workers, retail outlets, and branch offices with embedded local security. Highly distributed enterprises with little variation between sites are predicted to see the greatest benefit first.
Conclusion
Forrester sees security as core to any organization seeking to maximize the value and ROI of emerging technologies.
Three cybersecurity technologies, IoT security, quantum security, and zero trust edge (ZTE)—form the foundation of the ten emerging technologies. “The inclusion of these security technologies underscores a crucial point: the future belongs to those with the foresight and will to invest in security now. As AI capabilities expand, so do the potential vulnerabilities that malicious actors can exploit,” writes Brian Hopkins, vice president, emerging tech portfolio at Forrester.
Defending endpoints need to start with a zero-trust framework that enforces least privileged access and monitors everything happening on the network while also enabling microsegmentation to reduce the blast radius of a potential cyberattack. Relying on legacy account and identity and access management (IAM) systems that assume trust across systems and within identity management data structures is a breach waiting to happen.
Forrester’s top ten emerging technologies show a progression from already having significant use cases and adoption to newer technologies that are nascent in the market. All share a common characteristic with security, however. As technologies get more complex and remain unproven, security technologies need to step up the use of new technologies to counter threats. Quantum security and zero trust edge correspond with the direction of the ten emerging technologies. They reflect the need to keep improving security to protect the best ROI possible with new technologies on the horizon.
Stolen identity and privileged access credentials now account for 61% of all data breaches. This figure continues to increase as nation-state attackers, cybercrime groups, and rogue attackers integrate AI into their attack tradecraft.
Adversarial AI is taking aim at identities
80% or more of breach attempts aim first at identities and the systems that manage them. CrowdStrike’s2024 Global Threat Report found that identity-based and social engineering attacks are reaching a new level of intensity. CrowdStrike found that attackers are using AI to launch advanced phishing attacks to impersonate legitimate users and infiltrate secure accounts. Attackers have long sought account credentials, but in 2023, their goals centered on authentication tools and systems, including API keys and OTPs.
“What we’re seeing is that the threat actors have really been focused on identity, taking a legitimate identity. logging in as a legitimate user. And then laying low, staying under the radar by living off the land by using legitimate tools,” Adam Meyers, senior vice president counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told VentureBeat in an interview early this year. Two of the most infamous Russian nation-state attackers, Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, led these efforts, with the former exploiting a Microsoft Outlook vulnerability (CVE-2023-23397) for unauthorized server access.
Top ten trends defining identity and access management (IAM) in 2024
Forrester’s recent report, The Top Trends Shaping Identity And Access Management In 2024, provides an insightful view into the future of Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Privileged Identity Management (PIM). The report predicts that threat detection and remediation will improve with the help of A.I. Forrester also predicts that FIDO passkey authentication will go mainstream. In contrast, biometric authentication will slow down due to concerns regarding deepfakes.
Here is a summary of the top ten trends Forrester believes will shape IAM in 2024:
Trend 1: AI Will Improve Identity-Based Threat Detection and Remediation. Generative AI (genAI) is helping to redefine the future of IAM by improving outlier behavior analysis, increasing alerts’ accuracy, and streamlining administrative tasks while guarding against new threats.
98% of security professionals believe AI and machine learning (ML) will be beneficial in fighting identity-based breaches and see it as a pivotal technology in unifying their many identity frameworks. The majority, 63%, predict AI’s leading use case will be greater accuracy in identifying outlier behavior. 56% believe AI will help improve the accuracy of alerts, and 52% believe AI will help streamline administrative tasks.
Forrester asserts that AI will help short-staffed security teams triage alerts and automate time-consuming, mundane aspects of their jobs. Forrester also envisions genAI being used to query, “Which five applications are the riskiest from an identity entitlement perspective?” CrowdStrike announced at RSAC 2024 that Charlotte AI, CrowdStrike’s Generative AI security analyst, can automatically correlate all related contexts into a single incident and generate an LLM-powered incident summary for security analysts.
Trend 2: IAM Platforms Face Increased Scrutiny Of Their Underlying Security. High-profile breaches that began with impersonation leading to identity theft, including MGM and Okta, reflect how social engineering can still bypass IAM safeguards. CISOs are pushing back on their IAM vendors to improve operational processes and security practices and prioritize security for cloud-based SaaS applications and multi-cloud configurations. Forrester writes that their clients running IAM systems expect their vendors to comply with standards like SOC 2, FedRAMP, ISO 27002, and PCI. CISOs and security teams are also asking to vet a vendor’s workforce, including both employees and contractors and understand how the vendor communicates about and addresses security issues.
Forrester’s advice to security and risk management professionals is to “Demand multifactor authentication for all workforce business and admin users, without exception. Prioritize IAM vendors that embrace secure-by-design and secure-by-default principles and value continuous two-way customer engagement to improve their overall cybersecurity posture.
Trend 3: IAM And Non-IAM Vendors Respond To Identity-Centric Threats. More CISOs and their security teams are taking a zero trust mindset to breaches. They see them as inevitable, and as part of their zero trust frameworks, they’re looking to shut down lateral movement after an intrusion. Forrester observes that “both IAM vendors and non-IAM cybersecurity vendors keep making advances in identity threat detection and response (ITDR). As a result of organic development and acquisitions, ITDR capabilities are being incorporated in platforms from privileged identity management (PIM) vendors like ARCON, BeyondTrust, CyberArk, and Delinea, as well as XDR vendors, such as Cisco, CrowdStrike, Proofpoint, and SentinelOne.”
Trend 4: FIDO Passkey Authentication Goes Mainstream For Workforce And B2C Uses. Forrester notes that a large number of customer-facing sites, including H&R Block, PayPal, and Verizon, are moving to passwordless authentication. At the same time, smaller financial institutions like coinbase.com offer optional fast identity online (FIDO) Authentication and FIDO passkey-based authentication. The research firm expects 30% of B2C websites and apps to offer FIDO passkeys by the end of 2024.
Trend 5: Biometric Adoption Slows Due To Concerns Around Deepfakes. Despite biometric authentication being a security standard on smartphones, CISOs and consumers alike are becoming more concerned about deepfakes. Designing liveness detection and other advanced features for facial and fingerprint recognition systems reduces the threat of spoofing generated by deepfake technology.
As multiple breach attempts have proven, voice biometrics are more susceptible to attack. Forrester notes that in response, the FTC set a Voice Cloning Challenge to “encourage the development of multidisciplinary solutions—from products to procedures—aimed at protecting consumers from artificial intelligence-enabled voice cloning harms, such as fraud and the broader misuse of biometric data and creative content.” Vendors will add additional deepfake detection to their solutions in 2024, resulting in a rebound in biometrics adoption in 2025.
Trend 6: IMG And PIM Vendors Expand Coverage Of Cloud Administrator Identities. Getting multicloud and hybrid cloud security right is getting more challenging and complex to achieve at scale due to configuration complexity. Forrester notes that “zero trust in the cloud starts with understanding the data access entitlements of identities like cloud infrastructure administrators, SaaS administrators, and business users.” Security and risk management professionals need to review cloud administrators’ entitlements that grant access to sensitive data assets and, when necessary, cancel them. Forrester writes, “While tools offer detection and remediation automation, they are no substitute for documented and consistent identity governance processes.”
Trend 7: Government-Issued Digital Identities Continue To Spread. Forrester believes acceptance of government-issued decentralized digital identities (DDIDs) beyond government use cases will grow in 2024. Mobile digital identities, including driver’s licenses, are now available in the US states of Arizona, California, Florida, and Iowa. Jurisdictions that have or will soon issue mobile driver’s licenses include the European Union (based on the eIDAS 2.0 approved set of standards), Estonia, Hungary, and Sweden. Nigeria and the Philippines have digital identities active today. .
Trend 8: B2B IAM Becomes A Differentiating Feature. Security teams and CISOs running them who are operating without an extended IAM ecosystem for partners like contractors, suppliers, and resellers face more severe security risks. B2B IAM involves managing joiner, mover, and leaver (JML) processes differently than internal employees. Forrester predicts that in 2024, IAM vendors will enhance platforms with features like simplified federation onboarding, verifiable credentials for ID verification, and improved access review processes for the extended enterprise.
Trend 9: Commercial and homegrown IAM Solutions Face Growing Demand For Upgrades. Maintaining on-premises IAM systems is becoming more costly and inefficient, making it more attractive to move to a cloud-based platform. Forrester is finding that the brittle, less secure nature of on-premise legacy systems also makes them more difficult to upgrade. Demand is so high for replacing legacy systems that a recent Forrester survey found that the intention to replace homegrown solutions jumped from 4% in 2022 to 18% in 2023.
Trend 10: The Fine-Grained Authorization Market Heats Up. As digital platforms and business app creation continue to proliferate, the need for dynamic and fine-grained access controls is extending beyond security. Forrester says that the IAM market is moving toward centralized and external authorization patterns because of B2B2E and B2B2C relationships and the possibility that genAI could make it easier to create and manage authorization policies.
Over the past year, 66% of organizations experienced at least one ransomware attack, with many suffering repeated breaches. According to Deloitte’s Annual Cyber Threat Trends report, ransomware, identity-based attacks, and sophisticated attack methods like zero-day exploits and AI-driven cyber espionage dominate a rapidly changing threat landscape.
Ransomware attackers specialize in making chaos pay
Attackers are using ransomware as a smash-and-grab strategy, often to finance other illegal operations. Cybercrime gangs, including those that are state-funded, rely on ransomware as a primary source of revenue as well.
Ransomware attackers aim to create widespread chaos across supply chains, amplifying the impact of their attacks. For example, United Healthcare paid a $22 million ransom in Bitcoin, demonstrating how greater disruption often leads to higher payouts.
“Sophisticated ransomware operators are increasingly using zero-day exploits as their initial access vector, with 36 percent of victims ransomed in this way. Valid credential compromise was the second most common entry point for ransomware attacks,” says Deloitte in the report.
“Phishing, remote attacks on public-facing infrastructure, and unauthorized remote desktop connections continue to be the primary sources of infiltration for ransomware,” writes Paul Furtado, Gartner vice president analyst, in a recent research report, How to Prepare for Ransomware Attacks.
Furtado notes that “bad actors are mining exfiltrated data to identify other potential sources of revenue,” further increasing the urgency to harden cyberdefenses against ransomware attacks. The following is a typical ransomware attack pattern as defined in the Gartner report.
Source: Gartner, How to Prepare for Ransomware Attacks, 16 April 2024
CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence teams regularly monitor every known ransomware variant. “RaaS kits are easy to find on the dark web, where they are advertised in the same way that goods are advertised on the legitimate web,” writes Kurt Baker in a blog post explaining RaaS. The post continues, “a RaaS kit may include 24/7 support, bundled offers, user reviews, forums, and other features identical to those offered by legitimate SaaS providers.”
The 2024 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community found that “transnational organized criminals involved in ransomware operations are improving their attacks, extorting funds, disrupting critical services, and exposing sensitive data. Important U.S. services and critical infrastructure such as health care, schools, and manufacturing continue to experience ransomware attacks.”
Adversarial AI’s growing tradecraft
Deloitte’s research uncovered the growing use of adversarial AI for cyber espionage, finding it’s driving new forms of tradecraft in influence operations, social engineering, underground services, and collaboration.
Adversarial AI’s goal is to deliberately mislead AI and machine learning (ML) systems so they are ineffective for the use cases they’re being designed for. Adversarial AI refers to “the use of artificial intelligence techniques to manipulate or deceive AI systems. It’s like a cunning chess player who exploits the vulnerabilities of their opponent. These intelligent adversaries can bypass traditional cyber defense systems, using sophisticated algorithms and techniques to evade detection and launch targeted attacks.”
Influence operations are the most active threat vector of the three Deloitte is tracking. AI image deception and deepfake accuracy are accelerating faster than many existing detection technologies can keep up with.
Telesign’s2024 Trust Index found just how wide the trust gap is becoming due to deep fakes and broader influence operations. 87% of Americans hold businesses accountable for digital privacy, yet only 34% trust them to use AI effectively to protect against fraud. Deepfakes and misinformation are driving a wedge of distrust between companies, the customers they serve, and citizens participating in elections this year.
Deloitte found that social engineering-based attacks are becoming more challenging to identify and stop. Nation-states are weaponizing LLMs and using genAI to improve their ability to launch large-scale social engineering attacks aimed at harvesting privileged access credentials and gaining control of thousands of identities in an enterprise at once.
The rapid growth of Voice Cloning-as-a-Service (VCaaS) tools powered by AI, which is used for vishing attacks to clone voices for financial fraud and unauthorized access, continues to defy easy detection. Cybercriminals and nation-state adversaries are quick to invest in new technologies that yield tradecraft that existing cybersecurity systems can’t decipher, and deepfakes are among the most undetectable today.
Preventing a ransomware attack
Start with a zero-trust mindset. Any trust-based connections in a network are a liability—a ransomware attack waiting to happen. Furtado advises, “Build and execute on a zero-trust strategy that reduces the risk of attackers abusing implicit trust in environments to achieve lateral movement, employ available exploits, and gain privilege escalation to deploy ransomware.”
Furtado’s recommendations reflect a strong zero-trust mindset that seeks to eliminate lateral movement, enforce least privilege access, and monitor all network activity while hardening identity and access management (IAM) security. In short, he’s advising having as strong of a zero-trust framework as possible in place to withstand a ransomware attack.
One of the core concepts of zero trust is to assume an attack has already penetrated the network. Furtado’s key takeaways from his recent report on ransomware include the following:
Have a complete preincident prevention strategy that includes workspace and endpoint protection, data protection, immutable backup, asset management, end-user awareness training, and strong identity and access management.
Implement a reliable asset management process to identify what needs to be protected and who is responsible, paying particular attention to legacy systems.
Establish a risk-based vulnerability management process that includes threat intelligence (TI) to address unpatched systems.
Implement both macro and micro network segmentation to minimize the blast radius of ransomware attacks.
Build and execute a zero-trust strategy to reduce the risk of attackers abusing implicit trust in environments.
Remove local administrative privileges on endpoints and limit access to sensitive applications, including email, to prevent account compromise.
Prevent access to the command prompt and block the execution of PowerShell scripts on all user endpoints.
Implement strong authentication for privileged users, such as database and infrastructure administrators and service accounts, and log and monitor their activity.
AI continues to become more weaponized with nation-state attackers and cybercrime gangs experimenting with LLMs and gen AI-based attack tradecraft. The age of weaponized LLMs is here.
At the same time, multi-cloud-based infrastructures more businesses rely on are coming under attack. Exfiltrating any identity data available from endpoints and then traversing a network to gain more access by collecting more credential data is often the goal.
Cyberattacks that combine AI and social engineering are just beginning
Attackers have a version of human-in-the-middle, too, but their goal is to unleash AI’s offensive attack capabilities within social engineering campaigns. Last year’s social engineering-based attacks on MGM, Comcast, Shield Healthcare Group, and others serve as a case in point.
CrowdStrike’s2024 Global Threat Report finds that cloud intrusions jumped 75% last year. There was a 76% increase in data theft victims named on data leak sites and a 60% increase in interactive intrusion campaigns. Worse, 75% of attacks were malware-free, making them difficult to identify and stop. There was also a 110% YoY increase in cloud-conscious cases.
PwC’s 2024 Digital Trust Insights Report finds that 97% of senior management teams have gaps in their cloud risk management plans. 47% say cloud attacks are their most urgent threat. One in three senior management teams is prioritizing cloud security as their top investment this year.
Nation-state attackers are picking up the pace of their stealthy AI arms race. They’re looking to score offensive first victories on an increasingly active digital battlefield. Gartner predicts that in 2027, 17% of the total cyberattacks and data leaks will involve generative AI.
Another key assumption driving Gartner’s latest forecast is that by 2025, user efficiency improvements will drive at least 35% of security vendors to offer large language model (LLM)-driven chat capabilities for users to interact with their applications and data, up from 1% in 2022.
Gartner has also factored in the surge in cloud attacks and the continued growth of hybrid workforces. One of their key assumptions driving the forecast is that “by the end of 2026, the democratization of technology, digitization, and automation of work will increase the total available market of fully remote and hybrid workers to 64% of all employees, up from 52% in 2021.”
Source: Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Information Security and Risk Management, Worldwide, Published February 29, 2024
Market subsegments predicted to see the most significant growth through 2027 include the following:
Gartner has high expectations for Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) growth, stating the worldwide market was worth $575.7 million in 2021 and predicting it will soar to $3.99 billion in 2027, attaining a 31.6% CAGR in the forecast period.
Identity Access Management (IAM) is predicted to grow from $4 billion in 2021 to $11.1 billion in 2027, attaining a 17.6% CAGR. Identity Governance and Administration software is predicted to grow from $2.8 billion in 2021 to $5.77 billion in 2027, attaining a 12.8% CAGR.
Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP) are predicted to grow from $9.8 billion in 2021 to $26.9 billion in 2027, achieving a 17.2% CAGR.
Threat Intelligence software is predicted to grow from $1.1 billion in 2021 to $2.79 billion in 2027, growing at a 15.6% CAGR through the forecast period.
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) is predicted to grow from $928M in 2021 to $4.75 billion in 2027, attaining a CAGR of 30.2%. Gartner believes that the market share of cloud-native solutions will continue to grow. They are predicting that the combined market for cloud access security brokers (CASBs) and cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs) will reach $12.8 billion in constant currency by 2027, up from $4.6 billion in 2022. Gartner continues to also see strong demand for cloud-based detection and response solutions that include endpoint detection and response (EDR) and managed detection and response (MDR).
Bottom Line: Every business needs to resolve in 2022 to treat cybersecurity as a business decision first because the risk to operations and revenue are too great if they don’t.
Predictions don’t protect businesses, professional guidance does. Intending to provide every business, especially startups, with insights they can use to protect themselves in 2022, I’ve interviewed several cybersecurity CEOs. Their recommendations on what every business can do to improve their cybersecurity and avert a potential breach, ransomware attempt, or worse are provided below:
BOS Framework Founder and CEO Sashank Purighalla
Before BOS, Sashank founded and served as the CEO of 5Y Solutions, Inc., a DevOps company that provides SaaS and enterprise-class technology solutions based in the cloud, AR, VR, IoT, Media Streaming, and Big Data spaces. 5Y has offices in the US, Australia, and India. Much of Sashank’s 20+ years of experience has involved developing enterprise-class technology solutions, strong strategic and long-range planning, setting business and technology strategies in B2B and B2C environments, and leading and motivating diverse teams to build high-impact SaaS and PaaS products. Sashank has a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and a master’s degree in Computer Science.
Advice from Sashank Purighalla Founder and CEO at BOS Framework
“The biggest problem that enterprises are dealing with is with fractured technology architectures. The playbook for how technology systems are designed and maintained has fundamentally changed over the past 5 years with the advent of DevOps as a new disciple geared toward bringing efficiency to the PDLC process. To help meet this growing demand, there has been nearly a 570% increase in the number of known niche tools. Here’s the strange dichotomy: In the same timeframe, there has been an over 630% increase in the number of cyber breaches and over 600% increase in technology management and maintenance costs.
The fact is that you cannot patch disparate systems with non-standardized implementations using niche tools and expect to achieve security. Breach resilience and systemic integration can only result from sound systemic architectures that are based on best practices.
Enterprises must shift their focus from thinking of the next tool for efficiency or patching gaps to consistent architectures for effective holistic outcomes. This is an ecosystem problem and can only be addressed at an organizational architecture level”.
Founder Shield Co-Founder & CEO Benji Markoff
Benji Markoff is the Co-Founder & CEO of Founder Shield. He has an obsession with culture and the science behind it. He wants his legacy to be the success and positivity that everyone who works at Founder Shield brings to the world, whether at Founder Shield or in any their future endeavors. He hopes that Founder Shield provides a platform for unlimited success and happiness for all that work there.
Advice from Benji Markoff, Co-Founder & CEO of Founder Shield
“It’s old news that cybercriminals have beefed up their attacks, with ransomware and phishing topping every bad actor’s to-do list, it seems. The pandemic spotlighted weak links in cybersecurity systems nationwide, and hackers didn’t waste one minute to attack — back door, front door, didn’t matter. Hybrid work schedules and burnt-out IT specialists make the waters even murkier. Naturally, cyber liability insurance is a hot commodity currently, and the insurance industry plays a significant role in helping companies stay protected. Unfortunately, the attacks keep coming. Flip the script, though, and all these negative headlines can serve as lessons learned. For starters, let’s remember that cross-functionality value also translates to cybersecurity training. The more employers raise awareness and implement in-depth training, the lower they’ll fall on a hacker’s checklist. Keep cybersecurity top-of-mind throughout your entire company. Also, don’t be shy about relying more heavily on your managed service provider (MSP). These companies are ever-broadening their scope of services. If eyes and ears are what you need, start negotiating new MSP contracts.”
Apu Pavithran is the founder and CEO of Hexnode. Recognized in the IT management community as a consultant, speaker, and thought leader, Apu has been a strong advocate for IT governance and Information security management. In addition, he’s passionate about entrepreneurship and spends significant time working with startups and empowering young entrepreneurs.
Advice from Apu Pavithran, founder and CEO of Hexnode
“Enterprise customers in 2022 are looking for a seamless digital experience that they can adopt immediately. Unfortunately, while catering to this need businesses tend to overlook the cybersecurity risks involved in making this possible.
In practice, cybersecurity decisions mostly take the backseat when associated with budgetary needs and business priorities, however, what comes with that is a successful ransomware attack that can completely turn the equation upside down. So, while adopting a flexible working environment in a constantly changing IT landscape, I would strongly recommend having a device security policy and a UEM in place. This helps keep your sensitive information safe by making sure employee devices are always compliant.
A patch management solution that comes along with the UEM solution will monitor your devices to make sure that there are no security vulnerabilities. The solution will also make sure that your device is running on the latest OS update and protected from threat actors.
Endpoint security solutions like UEM’s will help secure businesses to an extent, But having the right tools can’t always ensure that your businesses are 100% secure. The biggest threat is always the human element in cyber security. So make sure that in your flexible work environment your employees are cyber aware with regular cyber awareness classes that cover updated cybersecurity best practices.”
Ivanti CEO Jeff Abbott
As CEO of Ivanti, Jeff Abbott oversees all aspects of the company’s growth strategy and direction. Before becoming CEO of Ivanti in October 2021, Jeff served as Ivanti’s President since January 2020. Jeff has over 25 years of experience working for enterprise software and services companies, including Accenture, Oracle, and Infor. Jeff holds degrees from the University of Tennessee and Georgia State University. He sits on the National Alumni Board at the University of Tennessee and has previously held board positions with the Georgia Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the Posse Foundation.
Advice from Ivanti CEO Jeff Abbott:
The rapid shift to remote work has accelerated growth in new digital systems and workflows, leading to expanded enterprise attack surfaces. At the same time, threat actors have matured their tactics and targeted enterprise security gaps. For example, attackers have increasingly waged phishing attacks at mobile devices, which remote workers are using more than ever before, via text and SMS messages, instant messages, social media, and other modes of communication, beyond just corporate email. Ransomware has also continued to evolve, with attackers increasingly leveraging known vulnerabilities that have remote code execution and privilege escalation capabilities. Ransomware is a business, and threat actors are incentivized to find companies that are more likely to pay.
Organizations are struggling to proactively combat these growing cyber threats. A new study by Ivanti revealed that 71% of IT and security professionals found patching to be overly complex and time-consuming. 57% of respondents stated that the global transition towards a decentralized workspace has made patch management more complex to deal with. And 53% said that organizing and prioritizing vulnerabilities takes up most of their time. This is alarming because the longer vulnerabilities remain unpatched, the more exposed a business is at risk of an attack or ransomware.
To effectively mitigate risk, companies should implement a Zero Trust security strategy. At its simplest, Zero Trust provides organizations continuous evaluation of their employee devices, endpoints, assets, and networks that business relies on. As part of an overall Zero Trust strategy, companies should invest in automated controls that proactively perform cyber hygiene tasks and reduce security risk across infrastructure and applications. This includes leveraging a combination of risk-based vulnerability prioritization and automated patch intelligence to identify and prioritize vulnerability weaknesses and then accelerate remediation. A proactive, end-to-end risk-based assessment strategy can drive business value and further reduce the mean time to detect, discover, remediate, and respond to cyber threats.
Orchestral Founder and EVP Dale Smith As Orchestral’s Head of Revenue Technology & Operations, Dale leads the digital infrastructure team responsible for integrating customer-facing operations across marketing, sales, and customer success to deliver extraordinary customer experiences that accelerate revenue performance. Dale has over 30+ years of experience in the tech industry, including several roles that include engineering, marketing, business development, and product management. His current startup, Orchestral.ai, provides AI-enabled IT workflow automation & orchestration technologies that facilitate digital transformation for some of the world’s largest enterprises.
Advice from Orchestral Founder and EVP Dale Smith
“Although there is an increasing amount of attention given to automation within the cybersecurity sector, there are still many gaps between the countless tools and SOAR/SIEM platforms found in a typical enterprise’s cybersecurity infrastructure.
To be sure, cybersecurity automation is a welcome and necessary focus for innovation in threat intelligence and response. But, as organization’s adopt cybersecurity automation, they are likely to discover that significant human intervention is still required to bridge the “silos of automation” that naturally develop around highly specialized security tools and platforms. It is at this point when the focus should shift to “cybersecurity orchestration”. Cybersecurity orchestration intelligently integrates all of the different and disparate tools, platforms and siloed automations so that information is shared across the entire cybersecurity infrastructure. In this context, cybersecurity automation and cybersecurity orchestration are complimentary stages of focus for developing security infrastructure capable of coordinating a truly “autonomous” threat response.”
Prometeo Co-Founder and CEO Rodrigo Tumaián
Rodrigo Tumaián is co-founder of Prometeo, a startup in the fintech area. He is also a co-founder of Truss, a company that provides information security services in the financial sector. His extensive experience working with national and international companies has enabled him to learn to adapt to any type of environment and help customers across a broad spectrum of business models, industries and revenue levels.
Advice from Prometeo Co-Founder and CEO Rodrigo Tumaián
“When we talk about Cybersecurity month to encourage awareness around the topic, we should keep in mind that it is something we must take action on every day. The repercussions that are caused when we find ourselves in the middle of a problem or a serious cybersecurity issue, profoundly impact our digital ecosystem. Constantly promote cybersecurity awareness – that’s what we’re focused on internally and with every customer – and we’re product of what we’re accomplishing with them and seeing them and we are very proud of what we have accomplished.”
Rapid.Space Founder and CEO Jean Paul Smets
Jean Paul is an entrepreneur, with 20 year experience and success in enterprise open source software for B2B markets. As Founder and CEO At Rapid.Space, he leads product and business development . Before Rapid.Space, Jean Paul founded Nexedi S.A the largest FLOSS publisher in the EU (4 M€ income). He founded VIFIB which invented edge computing in 2009 and contributed its technology to Rapid.Space. He holds a PhD in computer science, graduated from ENS Ulm and joined “corps des mines”.
Advice from Jean Paul Smets, Founder and CEO at Rapid.Space
“If you use a cloud service, make sure your cloud provider does not have access to your passwords or credentials (most have access and password leaks happen in average every year, as we all experienced). If you use containers, make sure you understand that they do not provide strong isolation (containers from other users on the same host may be able to access your sensitive data through security escalation, such as the one which happened to Azure in 9/2021)”
ThycoticCentrify CEO Art Gilliland
Art Gilliland is CEO at Centrify and brings proven success in the global enterprise software industry-leading large organizations in product development, enterprise infrastructure, cybersecurity, go-to-market strategy, and SaaS operations. He most recently was SVP/GM of the Symantec Enterprise Division of Broadcom, reporting to the CEO, where he led the integration and business operations post-acquisition. Before Symantec, Art held executive positions at Skyport Systems, HP, Symantec, and IMlogic.
Advice from ThycoticCentrify CEO Art Gilliland:
“As organizations execute on their digital transformations to adopt cloud and SaaS infrastructure it will become more essential to adopt tighter control over who has access to what. Investments in tighter controls over privileged access by using multi-factor authentication, centralizing identities, and enforcing least privilege can go a long way to securing modern infrastructure. This investment can not only make the user experience more seamless for those who need and should have access, but can also simultaneously harden defenses to reduce risk of becoming the next hack or ransomware victim.” — Art Gilliland, CEO, ThycoticCentrify
76% of enterprises increased their use of endpoint devices since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting their remote, work-from-home (WFH) and hybrid workforces globally.
66% of enterprises believe securing their networks and infrastructure requires a more focused, proactive approach to endpoint resilience that doesn’t leave endpoint security to chance.
Cybersecurity leader’s top challenges today are maintaining compliance, enforcing security standards, and understanding the health of security controls on each endpoint.
Just 38% of IT leaders can track the ROI of their cybersecurity investments, accentuating the need for more resilient, persistent endpoints that provide greater visibility and control.
These and many other fascinating insights are from Forrester Consulting’s latest study on endpoint security, Take Proactive Approach To Endpoint Security, completed in collaboration with Absolute Software. The study is noteworthy for its impartial, accurate view of the current state of endpoint security and the challenges IT teams face in creating greater endpoint resilience. The study’s methodology is based on 157 interviews with IT and security professionals located in the U.S. and Canada who are decision-makers in endpoint protection, with interviews completed in November and December 2020.
Key insights from the study include the following:
Security leaders are reprioritizing endpoint automation efforts with a strong focus on sensitive or at-risk data. In 2021 automation efforts will focus on sensitive or at-risk data (60%), geolocation (52%), security control health (48%), web-based application usage (36%), patch management (35%), and hardware inventory (32%). Each of these technologies is integral to supporting remote workers. There’s also a significant shift from how automation strategies were prioritized before the pandemic, as the graphic from the study below illustrates:
Maintaining compliance, enforcing security standards, understanding security controls’ health, and measuring security investments are the top challenges to managing endpoint security today. The majority of enterprises, 59%, cannot maintain or prove compliance of endpoints at any given time. Lack of compliance drags down the efficiency of endpoint security efforts, making an entire network more vulnerable. Just over half of enterprises can’t enforce security standards across endpoints or don’t know today’s health. The most surprising finding of the study: 62% of enterprises cannot measure the ROI of their security investments – with half (31%) – strongly disagreeing with how measurable security ROI spend is.
Enterprises see four key areas where endpoint management could improve today.Forrester asked enterprise IT and security leaders which capabilities need to be added to endpoint management systems to make them more effective. The executives first focused on securing sensitive and at-risk data, a sure sign enterprises are moving to a more data-centric cybersecurity model in the future. That’s good news as cyber attackers want to penetrate software supply chains and take control of systems managing data assets. Managing devices remotely at scale is second, which is also a frequent challenge IT and security teams encounter when attempting to patch endpoints. Having an unbreakable digital tether to devices is solving the scale issue while also providing greater endpoint resiliency, visibility, and control.
Conclusion
The pandemic forced every business to become more innovative in supporting work-from-home and hybrid work environments, improving endpoint security an immediate priority. What’s needed is an unbreakable digital tether to all devices, capable of delivering complete visibility and control, enabling real-time insights into the state of those devices, and allowing them to repair security controls and productivity tools autonomously. Of the many solutions available for securing endpoints today, the ones that take a firmware-embedded approach to secure endpoints are proving the most reliable. The more integrated an endpoint is to firmware, the more likely self-healing agents will be reliable while also providing complete visibility across every device on or off the network. Absolute’s firmware-embedded approach is noteworthy in its track record of securing endpoints during the pandemic.
Cybersecurity, privacy and security startups have raised $1.9 billion in three months this year, on pace to reach $7.6 billion or more in 2021, over four times more than was raised throughout 2010 ($1.7 billion), according to a Crunchbase Pro query today.
22,156 startups who either compete in or rely on cybersecurity, security and privacy technologies and solutions as a core part of their business models today, 122 have pre-seed or seed funding in the last twelve months based on a Crunchbase Pro query.
From network and data security to I.T. governance, risk measurement, and policy compliance, cybersecurity is a growing industry estimated to be worth over $300B by 2025, according to C.B. Insight’s Emerging Trends Cybersecurity Report downloadable here.
Today, 680 cybersecurity, privacy, and security startups have received $6.8 billion in funding over the last twelve months, with $4 million being the median funding round and $12.6 million the average funding round for a startup. The number of startups receiving funding this year, funding amounts and the methodology to find the top 20 cybersecurity startups are all based on Crunchbase Pro analysis done today.
New startups and established vendors are attracting record levels of investment as all organizations look to thwart increasingly complex, costly and unpredictable cyberattacks. There is an arms race going on between cyber attackers using A.I. and machine learning and the many startups and existing vendors whose goal is to contain them. CBInsights and PwC recently published their latest quarterly joint study of the venture capital landscape, MoneyTree™ Report, Q4, 2020. The study finds that monitoring and security deals were the third fastest-growing vertical in 2020, with Q4 being exceptional for all verticals, as the heat map below shows:
The 20 Best Cybersecurity Startups To Watch In 2021
Based on a methodology that equally weighs a startup’s ability to attract new customers, current and projected revenue growth, ability to adapt their solutions to growing industries and position in their chosen markets, the following are the top 20 cybersecurity startups to watch in 2021:
Axis Security – Axis Security’s Application Access Cloud™ is a purpose-built cloud-based solution that makes application access across networks scalable and secure. Built on zero-trust, Application Access Cloud offers a new agentless model that connects users online to any application, private or public, without touching the network or the apps themselves. Axis Security is a privately held company backed by Canaan Partners, Ten Eleven Ventures, and Cyberstarts. Axis is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with research and development in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Bitglass – What makes Bitglass unique and worth watching is how they are evolving their Total Cloud Security Platform to combine cloud access security brokerage, on-device secure web gateways, and zero-trust network access to secure endpoints across all devices. Its Polyscale Architecture is delivering uptimes of 99.99% in customer deployments. Bitglass’s 2020 Insider Threat Report has several interesting insights based on their recent interviews with a leading cybersecurity community. One interesting takeaway is 61% of those surveyed experienced an insider attack in the last 12 months (22% reported at least six).
Cado Security – Cado Security’s cloud-native forensics and response platform helps organizations respond to security incidents in real-time, averting potential breaches and security incidents. The Cado Response platform is built on analytics components that perform thorough forensic analyses of compromised systems. Cado’s platform, Cado Response, is an agentless, cloud-native forensics solution that allows security professionals to quickly and comprehensively understand an incident’s impact across all environments, including cloud and containers as well as on-premise systems. “Finding the root cause of security incidents in cloud or container environments is incredibly difficult. Traditional tools don’t support these new environments, and there is a shortage of people who know both forensics and cloud security,” said CEO James Campbell, formerly Director, Cyber Threat Detection and Response at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “Our Cado Response platform completely changes how security professionals can respond to incidents in the cloud.”
Confluera – Originally mentioned as one of the 20 Best Cybersecurity Startups To Watch In 2020, Confluera’s sustained innovation pace in the middle of a pandemic deserves special mention. They are one of the most resilient startups to watch in 2021.Confluera is a cybersecurity startup helping organizations find sophisticated security attacks going on inside of corporate infrastructures. The startup delivers autonomous infrastructure-wide cyber kill chain tracking and response by leveraging the ‘Continuous Attack Graph’ to stop and remediate cyber threats in real-time deterministically. Confluera’s platform is designed to detect and prevent attackers from navigating infrastructure. Confluera technology combines machine comprehended threat detection with accurately tracked activity trails to stop cyberattacks in real-time, allowing companies to simplify security operations radically. It frees up human security personnel to focus on more important work instead of spending hours trying to join the dots between the thousands of alerts they receive daily, many of which are false positives. The following is a video that explains how Confluera XDR for Cloud Infrastructure works:
DataFleets – DataFleets is a privacy-preserving data engine that unifies distributed data for rapid access, agile analytics, and automated compliance. The platform provides data scientists and developers with a “data fleet” that allows them to create analytics, ML models, and applications on susceptible data sets without direct access to the data. Each data fleet has easy-to-use APIs, and under-the-hood, they ensure data protection using advances in federated computation, transfer learning, encryption, and differential privacy. DataFleets helps organizations overcome data privacy and innovation struggle by maintaining data protection standards for compliance while accelerating data science initiatives.
DefenseStorm – DefenseStorm’s unique approach to providing cybersecurity and cyber-compliance for the banking industry make them one of the top startups to watch in 2021. Their DefenseStorm GRID is the only co-managed, cloud-based and compliance-automated solution of its kind for the banking industry. It monitors everything on a bank’s network. It matches it to defined policies for real-time, complete and proactive cyber exposure readiness, keeping security teams and executives updated on bank networks’ real-time security status. The company’s Threat Ready Active Compliance (TRAC) Team augments its bank customers’ internal teams to protect business continuity and skills availability while ensuring cost-effective coverage and management.
Enso Security – Enso is an application security posture management (ASPM) platform startup known for the depth of its insights and expertise in cybersecurity. With Enso, software security groups can scale and gain control over application security programs to protect applications systematically. The Enso ASPM platform discovers application inventory, ownership, and risk to help security teams quickly build and enforce security policies and transform AppSec into an automated, systematic discipline.
Ethyca – Ethyca is an infrastructure platform that provides developers and product teams with the ability to ensure consumer data privacy throughout applications and services design. It also provides your product, engineering, and privacy teams with unmatched ease of use and functionality to better care about your user’s data. The company helps companies discover sensitive data and then provides a mechanism for customers to delete, see, or edit their data from the system. Ethyca’s mission is to increase trust in data-driven business by building automated data privacy infrastructure. Ethyca’s founder and CEO Cillian Kiernan is a fascinating person to speak with on the topics of privacy, security, GDPR, and CCPA compliance. He continues to set a quick pace of innovation in Ethyca, making this startup one of the most interesting in data privacy today. Here’s an interview he did earlier this year with France 24 English:
Havoc Shield – Havoc Shield reduces the burden on small and medium businesses (SMBs) by giving them access to advanced security technology that protects against data breaches, phishing, dark web activity, and other threats. The Havoc Shield platform offers comprehensive security and compliance features that meet the standards of Fortune 100 companies, making it easier for businesses working to win deals with those companies. “For a long time, cybersecurity technology has been virtually inaccessible to small businesses, who largely can’t afford those resources,” said Brian Fritton, CEO and co-founder of Havoc Shield. “We created Havoc Shield because we believe in democratizing cybersecurity for the little guy. Small businesses deserve the ability to protect what they’ve built, just as much as larger companies that have dedicated cybersecurity staff.” Since the end of Q2 2020, Havoc Shield has quadrupled its client list. In the coming months, the company aims to grow its team to help more small businesses protect themselves from threats and achieve customer trust.
Illumio – Widely considered the leader in micro-segmentation that prevents the spread of breaches inside data centers and cloud environments, Illumio is one of the most interesting cybersecurity startups to watch in 2021. Enterprises such as Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas, Salesforce, and Oracle NetSuite use Illumio to reduce cyber risk and achieve regulatory compliance. The Illumio Adaptive Security Platform® uniquely protects critical information with real-time application dependency and vulnerability mapping coupled with micro-segmentation that works across any data center, public cloud, or hybrid cloud deployment on bare-metal, virtual machines, and containers. The following video explains why Illumio Core is a better approach to segmentation.
Immuta – Immuta was founded in 2015 based on a mission within the U.S. Intelligence Community to build a platform that accelerates self-service access to and control sensitive data. The Immuta Automated Data Governance platform creates trust across data engineering, security, legal, compliance, and business teams to ensure timely access to critical data with minimal risk while adhering to global data privacy regulations GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Immuta’s automated, scalable, no-code approach makes it easy for users to access the data they need when they need it while protecting sensitive information and ensuring customer privacy. Selected by Fast Company as one of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies, Immuta is headquartered in Boston, MA, with offices in College Park, MD, and Columbus, OH.
Isovalent – Isovalent makes software that helps enterprises connect, monitor and secure mission-critical workloads in modern, cloud-native ways. Its flagship technology, Cilium, is the choice of leading global organizations, including Adobe, Capital One, Datadog, GitLab, and many more. Isovalent is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Google and Cisco Investments. Earlier this month, Isovalent announced that it had raised $29 million in Series A funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Google with participation from Cisco Investments. Google recently selected Cilium as the next-generation dataplane for its GKE offering calling Cilium “the most mature eBPF implementation for Kubernetes out there” in its “New GKE Dataplane V2 increases security and visibility for containers” blog: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes/bringing-ebpf-and-cilium-to-google-kubernetes-engine.
JupiterOne – JupiterOne, Inc. reduces cloud security cost and complexity, replacing guesswork with granular data about cyber assets and configurations. The company’s software helps security operations teams shorten the path to security and compliance and improve their overall posture through continuous data aggregation and relationship modeling across all assets. JupiterOne customers include Reddit, Databricks, HashiCorp, Addepar, Auth0, LifeOmic, and OhMD. Earlier this year, JupiterOne received $19 million in venture funding. The Series A round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, with additional investment from Rain Capital, LifeOmic, and individual investors. “JupiterOne has developed a compelling product that integrates quickly, has applicability across enterprise segments, and is highly reviewed by current customers,” said Enrique Salem, partner at Bain Capital Ventures and former CEO at Symantec. Salem now joins the JupiterOne board. “We see a multibillion-dollar market opportunity for this technology across mid-market and enterprise customers. Asset management is the first step in building a successful security program, and it’s currently a tedious, imperfect process that’s well-suited for automation.”
Lightspin – Lightspin is a pioneer in contextual cloud security protecting native, Kubernetes, and microservices from known and unknown risks and has recently announced a $4 million seed funding round on November 24th. They will use the proceeds of the round to finance continued R&D on how to secure cloud infrastructures. The financing round was led by Ibex Investors LLC, the firm’s first global investment from its new $100 million early-stage fund, and also included participation from private angel investors. Lightspin’s technology uses graph-based tools and algorithms to provide rapid, in-depth visualizations of cloud stacks, analyze potential attack paths and detect the root causes, all of which are the most critical vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit.
Orca Security – Orca Security is noteworthy for its innovative approach to providing instant-on, workload-deep security for AWS, Azure, and GCP without the gaps in agents’ coverage and operational costs.Orca integrates cloud platforms as an interconnected web of assets, prioritizing risk based on environmental context. Delivered as SaaS, Orca Security’s patent-pending SideScanning™ technology reads cloud configuration and workloads’ runtime block storage out-of-band, detecting vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, lateral movement risk, weak and leaked passwords, and unsecured PII.
SECURITI.ai – SECURITI.ai is an AI-Powered PrivacyOps company that helps automate all significant functions needed for privacy compliance on a single platform. It enables enterprises to grant individual and group rights to data and comply with global privacy regulations like CCPA and bolster their brands. They collect and manage consent from multiple sources, including web properties, web forms, and SaaS applications. Their AI-Powered PrivacyOps platform is a full-stack solution that operationalizes and simplifies privacy compliance using robotic automation and a natural language interface. SECURITI.ai was founded in November 2018 and is headquartered in San Jose, California.
SecureStack – SecureStack helps software developers find security & scalability gaps in their web applications and offers ways to fix those gaps without forcing them to become security experts. The results are faster time to business and a 60%-70% reduction in the app attack surface.
The SecureStack platform’s intelligent automation manages security controls across distributed infrastructures using rules and profiles customizable by customers. SecureStack is noteworthy for its analytics and logging expertise in helping enterprises scale applications across cloud infrastructures.
Stairwell – What makes Stairwell one of the top startups to watch in 2021 is its unique approach to cybersecurity built around a vision that all security teams should be able to determine what alerts are threat-related or not and why. Mike Wiacek, the founder of Google’s Threat Analysis Group and co-founder and former Chief Security Officer of Alphabet moonshot Chronicle, leads the company as its CEO and founder. Wiacek is joined by Jan Kang, former Chief Legal Officer at Chronicle, as COO and General Counsel. Stairwell is backed by Accel Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Gradient Ventures, and Allen & Company LLC.
Ubiq Security – What makes Ubiq Security one of the top cybersecurity startups to watch in 2021 is how rapidly their API-based developer platform is maturing while gaining traction in the market. Ubiq Security recently signed commercial agreements with the United States Army and the Department of Homeland Security. This month, the startup announced it had raised $6.4 million in a seed equity investment round. Okapi Venture Capital, an early investor in Crowdstrike, led the round with participation from TenOneTen Ventures, Cove Fund, DLA Piper Venture, Volta Global, and Alexandria Venture Investments. Ubiq will use the funds to accelerate platform development, developer relations, and customer acquisition.
Unit21 – Unit21 helps protect businesses against adversaries through a simple API and dashboard to detect and manage money laundering, fraud, and other sophisticated risks across multiple industries. Former Affirm and Shape Security employees Trisha Kothari and Clarence Chio founded Unit21 in 2018 and work with customers like Intuit, Coinbase, Gusto, and Line to create a powerful & customizable rules engine for risk and compliance teams. Unit21’s highly flexible, customizable, and intelligent cloud-based system provides a configurable engine for transaction monitoring, identity verification, case management, operations management, and analytics and reporting. On October 19th of this year, Unit21 announced a $13 million funding round led by A.Capital Ventures. Additional participation includes investors such as Gradient Ventures (Google’s A.I. venture fund), Core V.C., South Park Commons, Diane Greene (founder of VMWare), William Hockey (founder of Plaid), Chris Britt and Ryan King (founders of Chime), Sumit Agarwal (founder of Shape Security), and Michael Vaughan (former COO of Venmo). Unit21 will use the new capital to grow its product and distribution-focused management team, increase sales and marketing efforts, and sell into new industries.
Bottom Line: Today’s largely-distributed enterprises need to make sure they are putting endpoint security first in 2021– which includes closely managing every stage of the device lifecycle, from deployment to decommission, and ensuring all sensitive data remains protected.
There’s a looming paradox facing nearly every organization today of how they’ll secure thousands of remote endpoints without having physical access to devices, and without disrupting worker productivity. Whether there’s the need to retire hardware as part of down-sizing or cost-cutting measures, or the need to equip virtual teams with newer equipment more suitable for long term work-from-home scenarios, this is one of the most pressing issues facing CISOs and CIOs today.
Wanting to learn more about how their customers are tackling their endpoint security challenges and how their companies are helping to solve it, I sat down (virtually) with Absolute Software’s President and CEO Christy Wyatt and Matthew Zielinski, President of North America Intelligent Devices Group at Lenovo. The following is my interview with both of them:
Louis Columbus:Christy and Matt, thanks so much for your time today. To get started, I would like each of you to share what you’re hearing from your customers regarding their plans to refresh laptops and other endpoint devices in 2021.
Christy Wyatt: We’re seeing a strong desire from organizations to ensure that every individual is digitally enabled, and has access to a screen. In some cases, that means refreshing the hardware they already have in the field, and in other cases, that means buying or adding devices. From the endpoint security standpoint, there’s been a shift in focus around which tools matter the most. When laptops were primarily being used on campus, there was a certain set of solutions to monitor those devices and ensure they remained secure. Now that 90% of devices are out of the building, an entirely different set of capabilities is required – and delivering those has been our focus.
Matt Zielinski: We are seeing historic levels of demand from consumers, as many are transitioning from having maybe one or two devices per household to at least one device per person. We’re also seeing the same levels of demand on both the education and enterprise side. The new dynamic of work-from-anywhere, learn-from-anywhere, collaborate-from-anywhere underscores that the device hardware and software need to be current in order to support both the productivity and security needs of hugely distributed workforces. That’s our highest priority.
Louis: Where are CISOs in their understanding, evaluation, and adoption of endpoint security technologies?
Christy: The journey has been different for the education market than for the enterprise market. Most enterprise organizations were already on the digital path, with some percentage of their population already working remotely. And because of this, they typically have a more complex security stack to manage; our data shows that the total number of unique applications and versions installed on enterprise devices is nearly 1.5 million. What they’ve seen is a trifecta of vulnerabilities: employees taking data home with them, accessing it on unsecured connections, and not being aware of how their devices are protected beyond the WiFi connection and the network traffic.
In the education space, the challenges – and the amount of complexity – are completely different; they’re managing just a small fraction of that total number of apps and versions. That said, as the pandemic unfolded, education was hit harder because they were not yet at a point where every individual was digitally connected. There was a lot of reliance on being on campus, or being in a classroom. So, schools had to tackle digital and mobile transformation at the same time – and to their credit, they made multiple years of progress in a matter of weeks or months. This rapid rate of change will have a profound effect on how schools approach technology deployments going forward.
Matt: Whether in enterprise or education, our customers are looking to protect three things: their assets, their data, and their users’ productivity. It’s a daunting mission. But, the simplest way to accomplish it is to recognize the main control point has changed. It’s no longer the server sitting behind the firewall of your company’s or school’s IT environment. The vulnerability of the endpoint is that the network is now in the user’s hands; the edge is now the primary attack surface. I think CISOs realize this, and they are asking the right questions… I just don’t know if everyone understands the magnitude or the scale of the challenge. Because the problem is so critical, though, people are taking the time to make the right decisions and identify all the various components needed to be successful.
Louis: It seems like completing a laptop refresh during the conditions of a pandemic could be especially challenging, given how entire IT teams are remote. What do you anticipate will be the most challenging aspects of completing a hardware refresh this year (2021)?
Matt: The PC has always been a critical device for productivity. But now, without access to that technology, you are completely paralyzed; you can’t collaborate, you can’t engage, you can’t connect. Lenovo has always been focused on pushing intelligent transformation as far as possible to get the best devices into the hands of our customers. Beyond designing and building the device, we have the ability to distribute asset tags and to provide a 24/7 help desk for our customers whether you’re a consumer, a school, or a large institution. We can also decommission those devices at the end, so we’re able to support the entire journey or lifecycle.
The question has really become, how do you deliver secure devices to the masses? And, we’re fully equipped to do that. For example, every Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop comes out of the box with Lenovo Security Assurance, which is actually powered by Absolute; it is in our hardware. Our customers can open a Lenovo PC, and know that it is completely secure, right out of the box. Every one of our laptops is fortified with Absolute’s Persistence technology and self-healing capabilities that live in the BIOS. It’s that unbreakable, secure connection that makes it possible for us to serve our customers throughout the entire lifecycle of device ownership.
Louis:Why are the legacy approaches to decommissioning assets falling short / failing today? How would you redesign IT asset-decommissioning approaches to make them more automated, less dependent on centralized IT teams?
Christy: There have been a few very visible cases over the past year of highly regulated organizations, experiencing vulnerabilities because of how they decommissioned – or did not properly decommission – their assets. But, I don’t want anyone to believe that that this is a problem that is unique to regulated industries, like financial services. The move to the cloud has given many organizations a false sense of security, and it seems that the more data running in the cloud, the more pronounced this false sense of security becomes. It’s a mistaken assumption to think that when hardware goes missing, the security problem is solved by shutting down password access and that all the data is protected because it is stored in the cloud. That’s just not true. When devices aren’t calling in anymore, it’s a major vulnerability – and the longer the device sits without being properly wiped or decommissioned, the greater the opportunity for bad actors to take advantage of those assets.
The other piece that should be top of mind is that once a device is decommissioned, it’s often sold. We want to ensure that nothing on that device gets passed on to the next owner, especially if it’s going to a service or leasing program. So, we’ve concentrated on making asset decommissioning as precise as possible and something that can be done at scale, anytime and anywhere.
Matt: Historically, reclaiming and decommissioning devices has required physical interaction. The pandemic has limited face-to-face encounters, so , we’re leveraging many different software solutions to give our customers the ability to wipe the device clean if they aren’t able to get the asset back in their possession, so that at least they know it is secure. Since we’re all now distributed, we’re looking at several different solutions that will help with decommissioning, several of which are promising and scale well given today’s constraints. Our goal is to provide our enterprise customers with decommissioning flexibility, from ten units to several thousand.
Louis:Paradoxically, having everyone remote has made the business case for improving endpoint security more compelling too. What do you hear from enterprises about accelerating digital transformation initiatives that include the latest-generation endpoint devices?
Christy: The same acceleration that I spoke about on the education side, we absolutely see on the enterprise side as well, and with rapid transformation comes increased complexity. There has been a lot of conversation about moving to Zero Trust, moving more services to the cloud and putting more controls on the endpoint – and not having these sort of layers in between. Our data tells us that the average enterprise device today has 96 unique applications, and at least 10 of them are security applications. That is a massive amount of complexity to manage. So, we don’t believe that adding more controls to the endpoint is the answer; we believe that what’s most important is knowing the security controls you have are actually working. And we need to help devices and applications become more intelligent, self-aware, and capable of fixing themselves. This concept of resiliency is the cornerstone of effective endpoint security, and a critical part of the shift to a more modern security architecture.
Matt: I think there are two major forcing functions: connection and security. Because we are all now remote, there’s a huge desire to feel connected to one another even though we aren’t sitting in the same room together. We’re modifying our products in real-time with the goal of removing shared pain points and optimizing for the new reality in which we’re all living and working. Things like microphone noise suppression and multiple far field microphones, so that if the dog barks or kids run into a room, the system will mute before you’ve even pressed the mute button. We’re improving camera technology from a processing standpoint to make things look better. Ultimately, our goal is to provide an immersive and connected experience.
Security, however, transcends specific features that deliver customer experiences – security is the experience. The features that make hardware more secure are those that lie beneath the operating system, in the firmware. That is why we have such a deep network of partners, including Absolute. Because you need to have a full ecosystem, and a program that takes advantage of all the best capabilities, in order to deliver the best security solution possible.
Louis:How is Absolute helping enterprise customers ensure greater endpoint security and resiliency in 2021 and beyond?
Christy: We spend a lot of time sitting with customers to understand their needs and how and where we can extend our endpoint security solutions to fit. We believe in taking a layered approach – which is the framework for defense in-depth, and an effective endpoint security strategy. The foundational piece, which we are able to deliver, is a permanent digital tether to every device; this is the lifeline. Not having an undeletable connection to every endpoint means you have a very large security gap, which must be closed fast. A layered, persistence-driven approach ensures our customers know their security controls are actually working and delivering business value. It enables our customers to pinpoint where a vulnerability is and take quick action to mitigate it.
Lenovo’s unique, high value-add approach to integrated security has both helped drive innovation at Absolute, while also providing Lenovo customers the strongest endpoint security possible. Their multilayer approach to their endpoint strategy capitalizes on Absolute’s many BIOS-level strengths to help their customers secure every endpoint they have. As our companies work together, we are both benefitting from a collaboration that seeks to strengthen and enrich all layers of endpoint security. Best of all, our shared customers are the benefactors of this collaboration and the results we are driving at the forefront of endpoint security.
Louis:How has the heightened focus on enterprise cybersecurity in general, and endpoint security specifically, influenced Lenovo’s product strategy in 2021 and beyond?
Matt: We have always been focused on our unique cybersecurity strengths from the device side and making sure we have all of the control points in manufacturing to ensure we build a secure platform. So, we’ve had to be open-minded about endpoint security, and diligent in envisioning how potential vulnerabilities and attack strategies can be thwarted before they impact our customers. Because of this mindset, we’re fortunate to have a very active partner community. We’re always scouring the earth for the next hot cybersecurity technology and potential partner with unique capabilities and the ability to scale with our model. This is a key reason we’ve standardized on Absolute for endpoint security, as it can accommodate a wide breadth of deployment scenarios. It’s a constant and very iterative process with a team of very smart people constantly looking at how we can excel at cybersecurity. It is this strategy that is driving us to fortify our Lenovo Security Assurance architecture over the long-term, while also seeking new ways of providing insights from existing and potentially new security applications.
Louis:What advice are you giving CISOs to strengthen endpoint security in 2021 and beyond?
Christy: One of our advisors is the former Global Head of Information Security at Citi Group, and former CISO of JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank. He talks a lot about his shared experiences of enabling business operations, while defending organizations from ever-evolving threats, and the question that more IT and security leaders need to be asking – which is, “Is it working?” Included in his expert opinion is that cybersecurity needs to be integral to business strategy – and endpoint security is essential for creating a broader secure ecosystem that can adapt as a company’s needs change.
I believe there needs to be more boardroom-level conversations around how compliance frameworks can be best used to achieve a balance between cybersecurity and business operations. A big part of that is identifying resiliency as a critical KPI for measuring the strength of endpoint controls.
30% of US and UK remote workers say their organizations don’t require them to use a secure access tool, including VPN, to log into corporate databases and systems, according to Ivanti’s 2021 Secure Consumer Cyber Report.
Plus, 25% of remote workers in the US and UK aren’t required to have specific security software running on their devices to access certain applications while working remotely.
And one in four US remote workers use their work email and passwords to log in to consumer websites and apps.
Cybersecurity gaps have continued to widen during the pandemic. A noteworthy survey by Ivanti illustrates exactly how remote workers are putting organizations at risk and where enterprise security is falling short, making those cybersecurity gaps challenging for CISOs to close. Ivanti’s 2021 Secure Consumer Cyber Report outlines the challenges that cybersecurity and IT teams have faced when securing remote workers in what’s being described as the “Everywhere Workplace.” Based on interviews with more than 2,000 US and UK respondents working from home in November 2020, the survey shows that authentication and endpoint security needs to improve across all devices that employees use.
IT Organizations Need Help Closing Their Cybersecurity Gaps
Of the many lessons learned from 2020, among the most valuable are how virtual workforces need self-diagnosing and self-remediating endpoints, while IT organizations need improved unified endpoint management (UEM) as part of a zero-trust strategy. Bad actors continue to target remote workers’ privileged access credentials to gain access and exfiltrate customer, financial and proprietary data, including intellectual property. Ivanti’s survey provides insights into where cybersecurity gaps need attention first:
The most challenging threat surface to protect is a person’s identity because it’s exposed across so many threat surfaces, including personal and work devices, consumer websites, and IoT devices in homes. The pandemic is proving identities are the new security perimeter. A person’s cell phone, personal tablet, and laptop is a real-time digital definition of a person’s identity. Nearly half (49%) of US remote workers use personal devices for their jobs, often without two-factor authentication enabled. The graphic below shows how organizations can close this cybersecurity gap by adopting UEM as part of their go-forward initiatives in 2021 and beyond:
Lack of consistent security software and password standards is a big contributor to US and UK organizations’ cybersecurity gaps today. One in four remote workers can access enterprise resources without any security software in place. An even more surprising finding is that 30% of remote workers in the US and UK can access corporate data without a secure access tool or VPN connection. If a remote worker’s identity is compromised, there’s a one in three chance that their organization will be breached, enabling cyberattackers to move laterally through the company’s systems:
Protecting remote workers’ identities & devices at scale requires Zero Trust. Automating as many tasks as possible while providing a continuous and seamless user experience is the surest way to close cybersecurity gaps. Getting rid of passwords and automating two-factor authentication using Zero Sign-On (ZSO), a core part of the Ivanti platform, is proving essential today. Zero Sign-On relies on proven biometrics, including Apple’s Face ID, as a secondary authentication factor to gain access to work email, unified communications and collaboration tools, and corporate-shared databases and resources. CISOs and their teams also need to consider how mobile threat defense can better secure personal devices against phishing, device, network, and malicious app threats. Late last year, MobileIron (now part of Ivanti) received its second mention in two years in the Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Platform Providers, Q3 2020. The Forrester Wave graphic is shown below:
In conclusion, enterprise cybersecurity gaps are widening due to a combination of risky consumer behavior and a lack of consistent security for mobile workforces. And these gaps will only increase as employees increasingly work from anywhere, using their personal devices to connect to corporate resources. To secure and enable the future of work, organizations need to start implementing and maturing an end-to-end zero trust security model today by leveraging new technologies and protecting their current security technology investments.
The Pharma industry has lost $14 billion through Intellectual Property (IP) cyber theft worldwide, according to the United Kingdom Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance.
53% of pharmaceutical IP thefts and related breaches are carried out by someone with insider access, also according to the United Kingdom Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance.
The pharma industry’s average total cost of a data breach is $5.06 million, with one of the highest costs of remediating the breach at $10.81 million across all industries, according to a recent ProofPoint study.
Over 93% of healthcare organizations experienced a data breach in the past three years, and 57% have had more than five data breaches, according to the Cybersecurity Ventures 2020 Healthcare Cybersecurity Report.
Gartner predicts the privileged access management (PAM) market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.7% from 2020 through 2024, reaching $2.9 billion by 2024.
Bottom Line: Having developed COVID-19 vaccines in a fraction of the time it takes to create new treatments, pharmaceutical companies need to protect the priceless IP, supporting data, and supply chains from cyberattacks.
Showing how powerful global collaboration between pharmaceutical industry leaders can be, the world’s leading vaccine producers delivered new vaccines in record time. The IP behind COVID-19 vaccines and their supporting supply chains need state-of-the-art protection comprised of cybersecurity technologies and systems, as the vaccines’ IP is an asset that cyber attackers have already tried to obtain.
Pharmaceutical’s Growing Number of Threat Surfaces Make Cybersecurity a Priority
The report provides specifics about how cyber attackers could impersonate an executive from a Chinese biomedical company known for having end-to-end cold chain expertise, which is essential for delivering vaccines reliably. The cyber attackers conducted spear-phishing attacks against global companies who support the global cold chain needed for distributing vaccines. There were credential harvesting attempts against global organizations in at least six countries known today to access vaccine transport and distribution sensitive information.
Launching a phishing campaign with the goal of harvesting details on key executives and access credentials across the cold chain is just the beginning. According to Lookout’s Pharmaceutical Industry Threat Report, some of the most significant threat surfaces are the most problematic today, including the following:
Research & Development & Clinical Trials
Collaborative research teams across pharmaceutical manufacturers globally
Scientists creating initial compounds and completing primary research to define a vaccine.
Integration of study sites at the test device and reporting system level
Manufacturing and Distribution
Plant workers’ systems, including tablets with build instructions on them
Physician & Pharmacist Networks
Distribution Channels and their supporting IT systems
Cyber attackers are taking a more synchronized, multifaceted approach to attacking Covid-19 supply chains, reiterated in CISA’s report. There’s evidence that state-sponsored cyber attackers attempt to move laterally through networks and remain there in stealth, allowing them to conduct cyber espionage and collect additional confidential information from victim environments for future operations. Cyber attackers are initially focused on phishing, followed by malware distribution, registration of new Covid-specific domain names, and always looking for unprotected threat surfaces.
10 Ways Cybersecurity Can Protect COVID-19 Vaccine Supply Chains
By combining multiple cybersecurity best practices and strategies, pharmaceutical companies stand a better chance of protecting their valuable IP and vaccines. Presented below are ten ways the pharmaceutical industry needs to protect the COVID-19 vaccine supply chain today:
Prioritize Privileged Access Management (PAM) across the vaccine supply chain, ensuring least privilege access to sensitive data starting with IP. CISA’s note finds that there have been multiple attempts at capturing privileged credentials, which often have broad access privileges and are frequently left standing open. PAM is needed immediately to institute greater controls around these privileged accounts across the supply chain and only grant just enough just-in-time access to sensitive IP, shipping and logistics data, vaccination schedules, and more. Leaders include Centrify, which is noteworthy for cloud-based PAM implementations at the enterprise and supply chain levels. Additional vendors in this area include BeyondTrust, CyberArk, Ivanti, Thycotic, Ping Identity, and Senhasegura.
Assess every supplier’s security readiness in vaccine supply chains, defining minimum levels of compliance to security standards that include a single, unified security model across all companies. In creating a secured vaccine supply chain, it’s imperative to have every supplier network member on the same security model. Taking this step ensures accountability, greater clarity of roles and responsibilities, and a common definition of privileged roles and access privileges. Leaders in this area include BeyondTrust, Centrify, CyberArk, Ivanti, and Thycotic.
Taking a Zero Trust-based approach to secure every endpoint across the vaccine manufacturer’s R&D, Clinical Trials, Manufacturing, and Distribution networks is necessary to shut down cyber attackers taking advantage of legacy security weaknesses approaches. The pharmaceutical companies and myriad logistics providers see a much faster than the expected proliferation of endpoints today. Trusted and untrusted domains from legacy server operating systems are a time sink when it comes to securing endpoints – and proving unreliable despite the best efforts that Security Operations teams are putting into them. Worst of all, they leave vaccine supply chains vulnerable because they often take an outdated “trust but verify” cybersecurity approach. Leaders include Illumio, Ivanti (MobileIron), Cisco, Appgate, Palo Alto Networks, and Akamai Technologies.
Extend the Zero Trust framework across the entire supply chain by implementing microsegmentation and endpoint security requirements across all phases of the vaccine’s development cycles. This will ensure cyber attackers don’t have the opportunity to embed code to activate later. The goal is to push Zero Trust principles to all related processes integrating with the vaccines’ pipeline, including all dependencies across the entire development lifecycle.
Incorporating Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) across every system in the vaccine supply chain is a given. Usernames and passwords alone are not enough, and MFA is low-hanging fruit to authenticate authorized users. MFA is based on two or more factors that can authenticate who you are based on something you know (passwords, PINs, code works), something you have (a smartphone, tokens devices that produce pins or pre-defined pins), or something you are (biometrics, facial recognition, fingerprints, iris, and face scans). For example, Google provides MFA as part of their account management to every account holder and has a thorough security check-up, which is useful for seeing how many times a given password has been reused.
Alleviate the conflicts of who will pay for increasing cybersecurity measures by making supplier-level security a separate line item in any CISOs and CIO’s budget. Today certain pharma supply chain CISOs are expected to ramp up cybersecurity programs with the same budget before Covid-19. While there are slight increases in cybersecurity budget levels, it’s often not enough to cover the higher costs of securing a broader scope of supply chain operations. CISOs need to have greater control over cybersecurity budgets to protect vaccine IP and distribution. Relying on traditional IT budgets controlled by CIOs isn’t working. There needs to be a new level of financial commitment to securing vaccine supply chains.
Consider using an AIOps platform adept at unifying diverse IT environments into a single, cohesive AI-based intelligence system that can identify anomalous network behavior in real-time and take action to avert breaches. Based on conversations with CIOs across the financial services industry, it is clear they’re leaning in the direction of AIOps platforms that provide real-time integration to cloud platforms combined with greater control over IT infrastructure. LogicMonitor’s prioritizing IT integration as a core strength of their platform shows, as they have over 2,000 integrations available out of the box. Relying on Collectors’ agentless system, LogicMonitor retrieves metrics such as cloud provider health and billing information. This collector then pulls metrics from different devices using various methods, including SNMP, WMI, perf Mon JMX, APIs, and scripts.
Unified Endpoint Security (UES) needs to become a standard across all vaccine supply chains now. Vendors who can rapidly process large amounts of data to detect previously unknown threats are needed today to stop cyberattacks from capturing IP, shipment data, and valuable logistics information. Absolute Software’s approach to leveraging its unique persistence, resilience, and intelligence capabilities is worth watching. Their approach delivers unified endpoint security by relying on their Endpoint Resilience platform, which includes a permanent digital tether to every enterprise’s endpoint. Absolute is enabling self-healing, greater visibility, and control by having an undeletable digital thread to every device. Based on conversations with their customers in Education and Healthcare, Absolute’s unique approach gives IT complete visibility into where every device is at all times and what each device configuration looks like in real-time.
Pharma supply chains need to have a strategy for achieving more consistent Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) across every device and threat surface of the vaccine supply chain. UEM’s many benefits, including streamlining continuous OS updates across multiple mobile platforms, enabling device management regardless of the connection, and having an architecture capable of supporting a wide range of devices and operating systems. Another major benefit enterprises mention is automating Internet-based patching, policy, configuration management. Ivanti is the global market leader in UEM, and their recent acquisition of Cherwell expands the reach of their Neurons platform, providing service and asset management from IT to lines of business and from every endpoint to the IoT edge. Neurons are Ivanti’s AI-based hyper-automation platform that connects Unified Endpoint Management, Security, and Enterprise Service Management. Ivanti is prioritizing its customers’ needs to autonomously self-heal and self-secure devices and self-service end-users.
Track-and-traceability is essential in any vaccine supply chain, making the idea of cyber-physical passports that include serialization for vaccine batches more realistic given how complex supply chains are today. Passports are an advanced labeling technology that provides the benefits of virtual tracking, verification of specific compounds, and yield rates of key materials. Serialization is a must-have for ensuring greater traceability across vaccine supply chains proving effective in stopping counterfeiting. Having digital passports traceable electronically can further help thwart cyber attackers.
Conclusion
By closing the cybersecurity gaps in vaccine supply chains, the world’s nations can find new, leaner, more efficient processes to distribute vaccines and protect their citizens. It’s evident from the results achieved so far in the U.S. alone that relying on traditional supply chains and means of distribution isn’t getting the job done fast enough, and cyber attackers are already looking to take advantage. By combining multiple cybersecurity tactics, techniques, and procedures, the vaccine supply chain stands to improve and be more secure from threats.
