Security Market Forecast: Troubles Ahead Spell Opportunities

The IT space is growing more dangerous. As much as security protection has advanced, new, more sophisticated threats are cropping up every day. While this is always an opportunity for solution providers, it’s time-consuming to make sure customers are protected—especially as the world moves more toward mobile devices and cloud computing and needs to deal with Big Data.

These issues are being brought to the forefront of the industry as researcher Gartner gets ready to kick off its Security & Risk Management Summit in National Harbor, Maryland, later this month. During this event Gartner is expected to outline its security market outlook, specifically highlighting areas around cloud, mobile attacks and the challenges in securing Big Data.

“Threats and vulnerabilities ebb and flow over the decades, but in the last two years we have seen a sharp increase in the sophistication of and motivation for attacks against commercial and governmental infrastructure across the globe,” said Andrew Walls, Research vice president, Gartner, and conference chair, in a prepared statement.

The problem is that organizations and even government agencies are not prepared for the new wave threats. Solution providers, take notice: While most IT security efforts focuses on defending the infrastructure, filtering content, detecting attacks and catching the errors, organizations also now are dealing with government-sponsored espionage and infrastructure attacks that are ideologically driven and globally coordinated, according to Walls.

“All of these threats, new and old, play out across infrastructure that is an assemblage of legacy infrastructure—both obsolete and up-to-date—and new, Internet of Things, operational technology, cloud and mobile infrastructure and services. The fundamental complexity of the digital environment has exploded, creating myriad vulnerabilities in infrastructure, process and skill sets. Security managers are working hard and fast to build new capabilities while maintaining the security of core infrastructure, while the technology leveraged by the enterprise grows daily in complexity and novelty,” he said.

So while organizations may be protected today. the level of sophistication is growing to such a scale that needs to be diligent in evolving their IT security strategies. Solution providers, of course play a major role here in making sure security remains Job 1.

One of the main areas of focus at the Security Summit will be the need for organizations to prioritize Big Data security. In fact, Gartner predicts that through 2016, more than 80 percent of organizations will fail to develop a consolidated data security policy across silos, leading to potential noncompliance, security breaches and financial liabilities.

“Businesses have traditionally managed data within structured and unstructured silos, driven by inherent requirements to deploy relational database management systems, file storage systems and unstructured file shares,” said Brian Lowans, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a prepared statement. “However, the advent of Big Data and cloud storage environments is transforming the way in which data is stored, accessed and processed, and CISOs need to develop a data-centric security approach. Unfortunately, this is not common practice today, and its planning is critical to avoid uncoordinated data security policies and management,” he said.

Solution providers need to work closely with CIOs and chief security officers to develop and manage enterprise data security policies that “define data residency requirements, stakeholder responsibilities, business needs, risk appetite, data process needs and security controls,” Gartner said.

This will become even more critical as cloud computing adoption and attacks focusing on mobile devices grow. Solution providers need to work with their customers on securing these evolving environments, since currently too many companies allow data to flow too freely.

Malicious hackers always seem one step ahead of security technology. Here is where solution providers need to focus and have the greatest opportunity.

Knock ’em alive!