As technology evolves to assist enterprises to become more productive, secure and resilient against trending security threats, so does the strategies and techniques of cyber attackers to exploit the vulnerabilities within these solutions. In 2013 we have seen a number of cyber attacks in the form of malware and phishing which is primarily aimed at sourcing and harvesting information from enterprises to be used for corporate espionage.
Similar to enterprises that exploit cloud-based technology for its ability to process, analyse and store information on a much greater scale than any on premise solution could, so would cyber attackers use similar approaches to deploy targeted attacks on enterprises at a much bigger scale which will result in larger financial losses and longer lockdown periods in 2014. The widespread adoption of cloud solutions by organisations will see the focus of cyber attackers shift to cloud service providers, especially where big data solutions are offered. Therefore we should find in 2014 there will be more stringent regulations and controls whereby enterprises can validate the authenticity, credibility and level of security by cloud service providers.
There will also be a big focus on POPI and organisations changing their technology roadmap for 2014 to ensure they are aligned to the POPI Act requirements in terms of protecting and storing data belonging to that of their users and customers alike, but also making that information available to them on request. Therefore organisations not only have to combat cyber attacks in order to protect their own company IP, but also to protect the private information belonging to that of their customers and users. This is going to be an enormous challenge for organisations as they are struggling already to find solutions to accommodate BYOD strategies and soon legislation will require them to protect and store the very same information these devices were designed to exploit from anywhere at any time.
Organisations will simply have to start taking a centralised approach towards processing, managing and storing information. The more platforms there are hosting or processing their company information, the more exposed and at risk they are. This is a result of data fragmentation which can occur either on premise or in the cloud and by finding a solution to this challenge first, organisations will simply need to secure one repository as opposed to multiple point solutions. This repository will need to be able to scale infinitely and allow access to information in a secure environment.
Due to the widespread adoption of cloud-based services, we also should see a number of new data migration tools coming about in 2014 which will aid organisations with the export and conversion of their 'big data' to a proprietary format in order to be imported by the cloud service provider.
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