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Top 6 Trends that Impact Your Security Posture

  • Top 6 Trends that Impact Your Security Posture-

    The Evolving Endpoint

    Both the number and the variety of endpoints that must be secured have been expanding rapidly in the past few years, especially with the upward spiral in mobility, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Gartner famously estimated that more than 26 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020; Cisco claims it will be 50 billion, and Intel says it will be 200 billion. Take your pick; the point is the same — an exponential increase in the volume and diversity of endpoints is underway.

    From a security perspective, most concerning is that many of these interconnected devices do not have a security profile or a security agent resident within them that the enterprise can use to validate security. From a network perspective, the enterprise must provide a consistent security policy across all of these new and emerging form factors that allows the scalability and visibility to adhere to and adapt to new security controls.

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Top 6 Trends that Impact Your Security Posture

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  • Top 6 Trends that Impact Your Security Posture-2

    The Evolving Endpoint

    Both the number and the variety of endpoints that must be secured have been expanding rapidly in the past few years, especially with the upward spiral in mobility, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Gartner famously estimated that more than 26 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020; Cisco claims it will be 50 billion, and Intel says it will be 200 billion. Take your pick; the point is the same — an exponential increase in the volume and diversity of endpoints is underway.

    From a security perspective, most concerning is that many of these interconnected devices do not have a security profile or a security agent resident within them that the enterprise can use to validate security. From a network perspective, the enterprise must provide a consistent security policy across all of these new and emerging form factors that allows the scalability and visibility to adhere to and adapt to new security controls.

Last year, according to the 2016 Cyberthreat Defense Report from CyberEdge Group, a shocking 76 percent of enterprises were victims of a successful cyber attack. Even more shocking is that these attacks are occurring despite increased spending on security. You can interpret this several ways. Companies are either overconfident about their security defenses; they're underestimating the extent of the growing attack surface; or they're unaware of how profoundly recent trends impact their security defenses.

For many companies, it's all of the above. In any case, the place to start in strengthening your security posture is to take a more structured approach to analyzing the security impacts of recent trends and prioritizing your security investments.

Brian Kenyon, chief strategy officer at Blue Coat (now part of Symantec company), has identified six overarching trends that significantly impact the security posture of the enterprise, along with the key requirements and considerations for strengthening security defenses in each category. This slideshow will present the big picture and a discussion of these six trends.