Cyber Security: Is This 2017’s Most Important Priority?
What’s next in Cyber Security? Traditional security for most businesses hasn’t changed much since CCTV and video intercoms and the principles of protecting physical property are well understood. But in the world of cyber security, both the potential threats and the best way to tackle them are changing constantly, and it’s vitally important for businesses of all sizes to stay up to date.
One of the big problems that the industry has been facing since day one, is an overreliance on purely reactive legacy tools. It’s good to have antivirus software and firewalls in place, but systems like these have to experience an attack from a virus before they can recognise it and protect against it. Last year the AV-TEST Institute identified roughly 500,000 new malicious programs every single day -and they could only do so once those programs had already attacked a computer.
So how do you stay ahead? Leading IT research and advisory firm Gartner estimate that worldwide spending on information security will hit $90 billion in 2017, and exceed $113 billion by 2020. And what do they expect the single biggest priority to be for that spending to be? Endpoint Detection and Response.
Endpoint Detection and Response is a term used in cyber security to describe a set of tools and capabilities built for truly modern networks with many devices and systems connected and interconnected, monitoring activity across every part of the network, feeding back to a central database for investigation, analysis, alerting and reporting. EDR systems use analytics tools that continually identify potential ways to improve overall security, deflecting common threats and enabling early identification and rapid response to larger scale, ongoing attacks. EDR describes a variety of different tools and while they don’t all work in the exact same way, they share this guiding idea of continuous analysis across all of the network’s endpoints together.
Implementing EDR is perhaps the next big challenge for the information security industry. Unlike some legacy systems, it requires a lot of technical know-how and proficiency to run an EDR system – and both the type and amount of work needed falls outside the scope of many in-house IT departments. An estimate by the non-profit IT certification organisation ISC 2 suggests that by 2020 the global information security sector could have a staff shortage of 1.5 million, and I think experienced, knowledgeable Endpoint Detection & Response specialists are going to be a key group who companies will be fighting over.
Kind Consultancy specialises in providing interim information security specialists to organisations across Europe, whether you’re looking to transform your organisation’s entire infosec strategy or rectify an already-identified vulnerability – If you’re seeking top-tier cyber security professionals to join your team on a contract or permanent basis, get in touch on jamie@kindconsultancy.com or 01216432100.
Jamie Dunning.
