Cyber resilience has become critical for organisations across South Africa and around the world, and emerging trends point to organisations investing in achieving resilience as a top priority in the year ahead.

This is according to Tumi Masobe, Business Development Manager at Keysight distributor Axiz, who says several key cyber resilience and cyber security trends will develop in 2022.

In addition to concerns about the cost and operational risk of ransomware and cyber attacks, organisations are focusing on cyber resilience as an asset, he says. “In the South African market, cyber security is getting board level scrutiny as it impacts investment, mergers, acquisitions and new business. Organisations are taking cyber security into account as part of their due diligence.” Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60% of organisations will use cyber security risk as a primary determinant in conducting third-party transactions and business engagements, and 40% of boards of directors will have a dedicated cyber security committee overseen by a qualified board member.

Gartner notes that by 2023, 75% of the world’s population will be under privacy regulations. “This means that compliance with privacy regulation will remain a priority,” he says.

“In addition, the ongoing hybrid and remote work model will drive a need for more stringent controls over who can access corporate systems and information.” Gartner expects more adoption of cyber security mesh – a modern conceptual approach to security architecture that enables the distributed enterprise to extend security anywhere. Gartner believes that by 2024, organisations adopting a cyber security mesh architecture will reduce the financial impact of security incidents by an average of 90%. Says Masobe: “We see all organisations moving towards zero trust network access. Unlike in the past, you no longer have a fortress protected by a moat and accessed across one drawbridge – now there are multiple bridges into the fortress due to communication evolution from private MPLS to SD-WAN, private cloud to public cloud and fixed desktop to BYOD and work-from-home adoption. You need to secure all those access points, so we see a decentralising of security.”

The Keysight Technologies 2021 Security Report expected 2021 to be the year that the network security for 100% of enterprises would reach compromised status level, whether the organisations know it or not. “As cyber resilience becomes critical and cyber risk increases, organisations have to start implementing zero trust as the foundation for a cyber resilience strategy,” Masobe says. “In a zero trust model, you trust no one and verify everyone, overcoming the weaknesses in the traditional perimeter one-step verification security model.”

Keysight’s full life cycle zero trust platform supports network segmentation, device management, visibility and analytics, and automation and orchestration using a complementary suite of technologies to secure all access to the network and applications, from any user and device from any location, while continuously testing the efficacy of the architecture and its policies.

For more information: https://goaxiz.co.za/technologies/keysight/

Contact us: [email protected]