Infosys TechCompass #64: Cybersecurity’s progress from horizon 1 to 3?

Cybersecurity has particularly advanced across infrastructure security (IS); identity and access management (IDAM); data security; governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC); vulnerability management (VM); managed security services (MSS) and threat detection and response (TDR); IoT, OT, and 5G; cloud security; and data privacy.

In horizon 1 (H1), cybersecurity shifted from perimeter monitoring with static policies to traffic evaluation against contextual policies, where false positives and true negatives were common. Secure application development practices emerged early but limited to secure coding and dynamic testing to find security vulnerabilities.?

In H2, security automation became the preferred method for efficient cybersecurity engineering, incident detection and response, secure cloud-native development, and MSS life cycle, with benefits of being human error free, scalable, and agile. This approach ensured automated?governance, context-rich visibility, and regulatory compliance adherence in multicloud environment. H2 offers integrated visibility of security gaps for virtual machines, containers; serverless computing; continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) integrations in DevSecOps; security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR); ZTNA for remote access; and integrated and automated governance for underlying multicloud platforms.

The Association of Corporate Counsel Foundation (ACC) report highlights the growing significance of legal departments within enterprises in shaping cybersecurity strategies. The percentage of chief legal officers (CLOs) has increased to 84% in 2023 from 76% in 2020. In H3, organizations realize the necessity?of enhanced cross-functional collaboration among legal, IT, security, and business units to deal with cybersecurity threats. NIST’s cybersecurity framework?(CSF 2.0) added the govern dimension to the existing identify, detect, protect, respond, and recover sequence to emphasize cyber governance alongside people, process, policies, control, and?compliance.?

As digital takes the center stage in business initiatives, cloud emerges as the nucleus of digital transformation. Digital Identities serve as the new perimeter for cloud platforms. The exponential surge in human and non-human identities and their respective entitlements in cloud have complicated identity and access governance. IDR within cloud infrastructure and entitlement management (CIEM) solutions has evolved as a streamlined solution.

Platform-led services revolutionize enterprise security against advanced cyber threats via a service-oriented approach. SASE, CNAPP, data security fabrics, and extended threat detection and response (XDR) are prominent platform-based solutions. They are mainstream for integrated cyber protection, context sharing, and convergence of use cases in one platform, aligned with zero-trust approach. Amid generative AI’s prominence, securing against deep fakes, data poisoning during learning large language models, and ensuring data privacy become crucial. Observability has also evolved to provide visibility beyond intrusion timing to intruder actions within enterprise boundaries to identify potential cyber risks. The cybersecurity mesh should merge robust policy management and governance, asset monitoring, and surface optimization across IT, OT, and cloud landscapes. Cyber risk visibility and integrated IT and OT security via unified cyber defense centers are?crucial for the entities exposed to critical infrastructure.?

Evolution of cybersecurity from horizon 1 to 3

Read our 2023 Cybersecurity TechCompass to know more.