Shannon Hulbert, CEO, Opus Interactive

“This past year the umbrella of security has experienced increasingly more complex cyberattacks, while the shortage of qualified cybersecurity professionals continues to grow. It’s no longer the traditional spam filtering, DNS gateways, and MFA – but security professionals now need to account for work from home and the new post-pandemic norm where more workloads are moving to the cloud. The rise in demand for cloud-based services, and hybrid and multicloud solutions, has created more complexity and endpoints in the IT ecosystem. But also, they are being accessed by users that are no longer at the centralized office but from a plethora of devices in a range of work from home situations.

“As more workloads move to the cloud, compliance standards to ensure the mission-critical workloads have the necessary security and compliance all the way through the supply chain is important. We’ve seen increased security events happening at every level this past year – from increased phishing and ransomware attacks, nation-state attacks on monitoring and mail, and fire- and natural disaster-caused outages. Security has grown to include components at each of those levels. The people you hire and contract with. The security and compliance of cloud environments you choose … and vendors they choose. The network. The facilities that house your infrastructure. The regions where you select facilities. Additionally, for those that are migrating to cloud-based applications, ensuring the selected vendors incorporate DevSecOps around planning, design, development, QA is also key. 

“The industry is rightfully headed to a space where customer references for vendor selection are a nice to have, but compliance and certifications become the requirement. Awareness and increased demand for third-party tested and verified solutions will likely be the way of the future.”