There’s nothing like a real-world headline to put our work in IT into perspective.
On January 11, 2023, a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) system outage caused at least 7,000 flights to be delayed for about 90 minutes. The FAA said the disruption was caused by an outage to a system called Notice to Air Mission alerts that sends real-time safety alerts to pilots.
“There is no direct indication of any kind of external or nefarious activity,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said. “But we are not yet prepared to rule that out.”
The FAA later issued a statement, saying it had “…traced the outage to a damaged database file.” And that it will “…take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again.”
Backing up your data, securing it, and managing it are the foundation of what we do. We may be in a new calendar year, but cyber resilience—the ability to weather and/or recover from a cyber event—remains an essential business objective.
Here’s a look at five trends and predictions for what to expect in 2023.
Mitigating ransomware
According to a report from IBM, the average cost of a ransomware attack last year was $4.54M. It should come as no surprise that most experts agree that ransomware attacks aren’t going away anytime soon. As long as there are vulnerabilities to be exploited, bad actors will exploit them.
Prediction: Preventing and reducing the impact of cyberattacks like ransomware will surely be a priority for data security professionals
Merging data security and data management
Data security and management aren’t two separate issues. They’re two sides of the same coin. How can you secure your data if you can’t manage it? And how can you manage it if you can’t secure it? In the year ahead, businesses will be forced to find ways to do both, ideally in an integrated, holistic, and strategic way.
Prediction: Market conditions and budgets will continue to be dynamic well into 2023, so expect to see greater demand for cost-effective, efficient, and modern platform solutions to solve this critical business need.
Data classification
Assuming you’ve secured and managed your data, how do you take it to the next level and get value from it? Extract insights from it? Meet compliance requirements? You first need to classify it. Classifying lets you see what’s inside your data (so it’s now searchable and intelligent), but it also lets you pinpoint where your greatest vulnerabilities are.
Prediction: In 2023, data classification will go from a nice-to-have to a must-have.
Prioritizing cyber vaulting
Cyber vaulting, the practice of securely storing critical data in an isolated environment, will continue to be an effective way to protect backup data from cyberattacks. Storing a clean, uncorrupted, and immutable copy of data in a cyber vault ensures you’ll also have a clean, uncompromised copy of your data for post-attack recovery purposes. If you’re looking for an added layer of security in today’s cybercriminal-rich environment, this is it.
Prediction: More enterprises will prioritize not just protection from ransomware attacks, but keeping their data unreachable so attacks are less calamitous when they do occur.
Recognizing the evolving role of the CIO, CISO, and Board
As data security evolves from a tech topic to an essential boardroom discussion item, the roles of CIOs, CISOs, and board members will evolve in parallel. Technology and data are no longer just subsections of the business world. Tech and data are part of our daily lives.
Prediction: Expect to see formerly siloed IT and SecOps teams and budgets become more closely aligned and in greater overall communication.
To hear more about my predictions for the year ahead in cybersecurity, be sure to check out the January episode of Spotlight on Security. Also featured in the episode are Jason Chan, former VP of Information Security at Netflix, and Marianne Bailey, former senior cybersecurity executive at the NSA and CIO/CISO at the Department of Defense.
