Understand how these top cybersecurity trends for 2024 reflect the need for more agile and responsive cybersecurity programs.
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Cybersecurity Trends: Optimise for Resilience and Performance
Drive value while protecting the business
Digital technology initiatives continue to top the CEO’s priority list. That is changing the operating context for cybersecurity leaders and driving investments that enable security teams to be more resilient while delivering higher performance.
Download this infographic to learn:
- Which nine capabilities cybersecurity leaders are prioritising in 2024
- How organisations balance the need to mitigate risk with the imperative to drive digital
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2024 top trends in cybersecurity focus on resilience, performance
Cybersecurity leaders: Take note of these cybersecurity trends to evolve your cybersecurity programs amid new threats.
- What’s New in 2024?
- Cybersecurity and Resilience
- Cybersecurity Performance
A fast-evolving threat environment is changing the focus of cybersecurity
“What is cybersecurity?” It’s the practice of deploying people, processes, policies and technologies to protect organisations, their critical systems and sensitive information from digital attacks.
How organisations do that is changing radically.
Staying current on cybersecurity trends and best practices is critical for cybersecurity leaders to effectively manage the fast-evolving daily threats and exposures the organisation faces — without constraining business ambitions.
The Gartner Top Trends in Cybersecurity 2024 survey finds emerging pressure from:
The emergence of generative AI (GenAI) as a mainstream capability
The continued gap between security-talent supply and demand
Relentless growth in cloud adoption, which is altering the composition of digital ecosystems
Increasing regulatory obligations and government oversight of cybersecurity, privacy and data localisation
Continued decentralisation of digital capabilities across enterprises
The challenge of managing security exposures in a constantly evolving threat environment
In response, cybersecurity leaders are working to equip their functions with agile and responsive capabilities. The 2024 trends report shows their actions and priorities center on nine practices, technical capabilities and structural reforms — each helping cybersecurity leaders to achieve two goals of improving:
- Organisational resilience to drive security investments amid the continued sprawl of digital ecosystems (e.g., broader cloud adoption, hybrid work arrangements and an evolving threat environment)
Cybersecurity function performance by harnessing GenAI capabilities, prioritising security behavior and culture programs, and adopting outcome-driven metrics (ODMs) to facilitate decision making
How cybersecurity programs make the organisation more resilient
Security and risk management leaders are tasked with improving organisational resilience in a world of increasing risk. Several interconnected factors are driving this focus on resilience, including:
Digital ecosystems continue to sprawl due to increasing cloud adoption.
Organisations are entrenching hybrid work arrangements.
The threat environment continues to evolve as new capabilities embolden attackers.
It’s not feasible to remediate every potential vulnerability in the organisation, given how they are exploding in today’s digital environments. Among the resources to protect are:
Facilities
Equipment
Workers
Third parties
Business process outsourcers
Technology providers (such as cloud/IT services)
Managing and reporting on resilience involves the entire enterprise and is becoming more challenging due to regulations and customer expectations. The Gartner Top Cybersecurity Trends for 2024 report highlights four activities focused on shoring up resilience.
Continuous threat exposure management programs
The increase in digital attack surfaces has left organisations with more potential exposures from self-managed technology vulnerabilities, as well as from cloud-driven applications. Cybersecurity models focused on patching and securing physical and self-managed software systems are not broad enough for today’s environment.
Learn more about cybersecurity threats and how to prioritise, manage and reduce them.
Evolving identity and access management
Attacks against identity infrastructure are common, and identity-first security is a key control surface for cyber teams. For these reasons, among others, cybersecurity leaders are shifting their focus from network security to identity and access management (IAM). With this move, organisational practices will need to evolve to improve identity hygiene, invest in IAM training for SecOps teams and evolve the identity infrastructure to identify fabric architecture.
Third-party cybersecurity risk management
Third-party partners are a large and growing part of the enterprise technology footprint — and they inevitably experience cybersecurity incidents. In response, cybersecurity leaders are prioritising resilience-oriented investments and supporting business partners in resilience-oriented third-party contracting and control decisions.
Privacy-driven application and data decoupling
As more nations enforce privacy and data protection and localisation requirements, forward-thinking organisations must rethink their compliance processes, data migration and integration practices, and data architecture and storage.
Improve security performance with 5 actions and priorities
Even as cybersecurity leaders recognize the folly of trying to fully protect against every risk, they are still under pressure to improve security without constraining the business or spending an exorbitant amount of resources. High and ever-improving performance is a key priority.
At the same time, the themes of distributed threat exposure and increasingly decentralized decision making raise an ongoing question: Who is responsible for cybersecurity? The answer is: Everyone. Accountability still falls mostly on the shoulders of cybersecurity leaders. Yet given the spreading nature of risk, there is a growing role for boards of directors and business unit partners to ensure they share responsibility, accountability and governance.
Given those goals of increasing performance within an environment of distributed responsibility, the Gartner Top Cybersecurity Trends for 2024 highlights five investments that promise to help meet the organisation’s cybersecurity needs according to its risk appetite. They include:
Generative AI
GenAI is on the agenda for inclusion across many functions. Cybersecurity leaders are preparing for swift adoption and evolution within the business, as well as within the cybersecurity practice itself. Security operations and application security are two primary areas where providers are adding capabilities using GenAI. New use cases are emerging quickly.
Security behavior and culture programs
Raising awareness of cyber risks has been shown to be ineffective at reducing the number of security incidents. A security behavior and culture program (SBCP) instead combines awareness training and phishing simulation with behavior-influencing disciplines.
Cybersecurity outcome-driven metrics
Cybersecurity leaders increasingly must articulate the value of cyber investments to the business in measurable ways. They also need strategies for articulating the cybersecurity impact of changes to the business strategy. ODMs are embraced as a way to do that.
Evolving cybersecurity operating models
The continued shift of technology assets out of central IT and into business areas is breaking traditional cybersecurity operating models. Cybersecurity leaders are responding by evolving their operating models, in particular, by educating and empowering resource owners with the knowledge and processes they need to locally govern their resources.
Cybersecurity reskilling
The global cybersecurity talent shortage is a perennial issue requiring cybersecurity leaders to reskill their teams by retraining existing talent, including in “adjacent” skills, and hiring new talent with new profiles, some of which focus on soft skills.
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Frequently asked questions on cybersecurity
Why does cybersecurity fail?
Cybersecurity fails because of a lack of adequate controls. No organisation can be 100% secure. Cybersecurity teams must decide where, when and how to invest in IT controls and cyber defense. To do that, benchmark your security capabilities and identify gaps to fill and priorities to target.
Do not overlook the human element. Cybercriminals have become experts at social engineering to trick employees. Making sure employees have the information and know-how to defend against attacks is critical.
How much should I spend on cybersecurity?
The question is not how much to spend, but rather what level of protection your organisation wants to achieve based on its risk appetite.
To determine that, use ODMs applied to the controls that address each threat. For example, in the event of a ransomware attack, an organisation has three critical controls: backup and restore, business continuity and phishing training. The ODMs of these three controls reflect how well the organisation is protected and what it costs.
Take a cost optimisation approach to evaluate the cost (investment), value (benefit) and level of risk managed for each control.
The Top 3 Priorities for Enterprise Risk Management Leaders in 2024
What is the future of cybersecurity?
The environment is evolving in several key ways:
Growing network, infrastructure and architectural complexity
Increasing sophistication of threats and poor threat sensing
Third-party vulnerabilities
Cybersecurity debt
Cyber-physical systems