Experfy
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Future of Work
  • AI & Machine Learning
  • Big Data & Cloud
  • IoT & Automation
  • Software
  • ConsumerTech
  • HealthTech
  • FinTech
  • Home
  • Future of Work
  • AI & Machine Learning
  • Big Data & Cloud
  • IoT & Automation
  • Software
  • ConsumerTech
  • HealthTech
  • FinTech
No Result
View All Result
Experfy Insights
No Result
View All Result
Home Future of Work

Post-Covid Outlook for Cyber Security: New Normal … Looking a Lot Like the Old

Jean-Christophe Gaillard by Jean-Christophe Gaillard
November 16, 2020
in Future of Work
4 min read
0
Post-Covid Outlook for Cyber Security: New Normal … Looking a Lot Like the Old
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

The COVID crisis has not changed the cyber security fundamentals: What will the new normal be like?

Two recent reports highlight the current cyber security paradox: While the COVID pandemic has turned business and society upside down, well-established cyber security practices – some known for decades – remain the best way to protect yourself.

It might not be the message the authors of those reports wanted to convey, but it remains the dominant impression.

The first one, from the World Economic Forum, published in May (“Cybersecurity Leadership Principles: Lessons learnt during the COVID-19 pandemic to prepare for the new normal” – WEF – 26 May 2020) is once again a superlative summary of good practices, which in the end hardly moves the needle. We commented along the same lines on one of their earlier reports last year.

Using buzzwords like “resilience” instead of “security” or “continuity” does not disguise the fact that 80% or more of the “lessons learnt” highlighted in the report (e.g. “focus on critical services”, “implement meaningful metrics” or “practice crisis management plans”) can be summarised in three words: Follow Good Practice… More than ever, doing the right thing around cyber security, seems to consist of doing now what you should have done ten years ago…

Obviously, if those are still valuable “lessons learnt” worth highlighting to world leaders, it implies they were not properly in place pre-COVID in spite of having been known as security good practices for decades, but the report stays well clear from discussing why…

The second report, from InfoSecurity Magazine, published in June (“State of Cybersecurity Report 2020” – InfoSecurity Magazine – 3 June 2020) offers – as expected – a more technical perspective but points in the same direction with regards to its key takeaways.

The key importance of human elements in cyber security or the fact that “the evolution of the cloud is driving innovation whilst also exposing organizations to new security and privacy challenges” are nothing new.

It is evident that the COVID pandemic has accented and accelerated those, but once again, the cloud was not born out of COVID and good practices in those areas should have been in place for decades.

As a matter of fact, our 2019 report on the “Language of Security” (built on the semantics analysis of the content of 17 annual “Global Information Security Surveys” from leading firm EY, spanning the period 2002-2018) shows without ambiguity cloud security considerations dominating the period 2010-2011-2012 before receding dramatically.

The shift of focus away from compliance is also something our 2019 report highlighted, but again this is a ten years old long-term trend starting around 2010 (and arguably one of the key findings of our research): The first decade of this century was the true “compliance” decade for cyber security; the last decade has been a “realisation” decade dominated by incidents and threats considerations, leading to the acceptance by many business leaders of a “when-not-if” paradigm around cyber-attacks.

The “when-not-if” paradigm creates completely new challenges for CISOs and CIOs: Old and well-established security basics still go a long way to ensure protection but the challenges are now firmly around execution, while roadblocks remain rooted in governance dysfunctions and short-termist business cultures.

The COVID crisis does not change any of that but it does aggravate short-termist business tendencies and will constrain budgetary resources dramatically in most industries.

If one thing is going to change (for some tech vendors at least), is that throwing money indiscriminately at the cyber security problems in the hope of making them disappear is going to stop: Spending and resources will have to be focused where they can have the most impact and that has to start with a sound appreciation of critical assets and their risk posture. But again, focusing on those “crown jewels” should be seen as one of the oldest and best-established good practices…

It looks like the “new normal” is definitely going to look a lot like the old.

Tags: Cyber SecurityFundamentalsPost-COVID
Previous Post

How to Future-Proof Your Data Science Project

Next Post

What Every Aspiring Data Scientist Needs To Know About Coding

Jean-Christophe Gaillard

Jean-Christophe Gaillard

Jean-Christophe Gaillard is Managing Director and Founder at Corix Partners. He is also a Non-Executive Director with Strata Security Solutions, a specialized cybersecurity firm. He has been co-president of the Cyber Security group of the Telecom Paris Tech alumni association since May 2016. He is the author of “Cyber Security: The Lost Decade – A Security Governance Handbook for the CISO and the CIO”, He contributes regularly to The Digital Transformation People, Business 2 Community, and IoTforAll platforms, as well as the Business Transformation Network. He is an expert contributor on the CIO Water Cooler and has previously published articles on InfoSecurity Magazine,  Computing, the C-Suite.co.uk, Info Sec Buzz and the IoD Director websites.

Next Post
What Every Aspiring Data Scientist Needs To Know About Coding

What Every Aspiring Data Scientist Needs To Know About Coding

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

POPULAR POST

  • A Comparison of Tableau and Power BI, the Two Top Leaders in the BI Market

    A Comparison of Tableau and Power BI, the Two Top Leaders in the BI Market

    11910 shares
    Share 4769 Tweet 2975
  • Insights to Agile Methodologies for Software Development

    3022 shares
    Share 1209 Tweet 756
  • Why You Should Forget Loops and Embrace Vectorization for Data Science

    2686 shares
    Share 1074 Tweet 672
  • Greedy Algorithm And Dynamic Programming

    2064 shares
    Share 826 Tweet 516
  • Cloudera vs Hortonworks vs MapR: Comparing Hadoop Distributions

    2057 shares
    Share 822 Tweet 514
Experfy Insights

Experfy Insights provides cutting-edge perspectives on Big Data and analytics. Our unique ability to focus on business problems enables us to provide insights that are highly relevant to each industry.

Join Us At

About Us

Contact Us


1700 West Park Drive, Suite 190
Westborough, MA 01581

Email: [email protected]

Toll Free: (844) EXPERFY or
(844) 397-3739

© 2020, Experfy Inc. All rights reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Future of Work
  • AI & Machine Learning
  • Big Data & Cloud
  • IoT & Automation
  • Software
  • ConsumerTech
  • HealthTech
  • FinTech

© 2020, Experfy Inc. All rights reserved.