Can technological progress outpace security measures?
In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, security professionals face a significant challenge: keeping pace with advancements and understanding new security technologies. This is crucial for businesses, as technological progress offers opportunities through better data access, collaboration platforms, powerful computations, and AI usage.
To meet this challenge, training security staff on both basic and new skills is key. Embracing technology is not about replacing human expertise, but about leveraging it effectively. The convergence of technical, physical, personnel, and cyber specialisms is essential for effective organizational risk management.
Current strategies for integrating security professionals into technology discussions and maintaining essential security principles focus on early collaboration, embedding security into development, leveraging AI and automation, and continuous exposure management.
Embedding security early in the technology lifecycle ensures secure-by-design principles are incorporated, reducing vulnerabilities and shortening the time for compliance and audit processes. Leveraging AI to augment security teams combines AI-driven analytics with human expertise, enabling quick sifting through vast data, detecting anomalies, and prioritising sophisticated threats.
Automating security operations reduces human error and improves responsiveness to vulnerabilities, maintaining system integrity as technology evolves rapidly. Continuous exposure management and real-time monitoring integrate operational data with automated intelligence to identify and remediate emergent vulnerabilities, especially important in interconnected OT and critical infrastructure environments.
Cross-disciplinary collaboration and integration are also vital. Security professionals collaborate closely with IT, operations, and business teams to build resilience against evolving cyber risks. This includes training and recruitment aligned with emerging technologies like AI and IoT to keep the security workforce current and effective.
Adapting to digitized and cloud-connected environments is another essential aspect. With operational technology becoming more digitized and connected via the cloud, security professionals ensure layered defenses that address expanded attack surfaces, including cloud configurations and IoT endpoints.
Sarah Austerberry at Au Security Consulting ([email protected]) and Julie Nel at B4 Secure ([email protected]) are points of contact for those seeking advice on these matters. Hayley Elvins at Sloane Risk Group ([email protected]) is another valuable resource.
However, it's important to remember that security often acts in a catch-up mode, and it's difficult to make a case for increased security budgets for potential future threats. Essential security principles, such as knowing the threat landscape, air-gapping systems, layering defenses, and instilling good security behaviors in people, remain crucial, even in the absence of technology.
In summary, the current strategy prioritises early and continuous integration of security expertise throughout technology design and operations, empowered by AI and automation, and supported by dynamic, data-driven exposure management frameworks. This holistic approach helps organisations stay ahead in a complex landscape of accelerating technological change and threat sophistication.
A pivotal aspect of this holistic approach is providing ongoing training to security staff, ensuring they stay abreast of both foundational and emerging cybersecurity technologies. Given the intersection of technology progress and cybersecurity concerns, leveraging technology effectively is not only about adopting new tools but also about using them securely. This means not only adopting cutting-edge technology solutions like AI and automation but also embracing the cross-disciplinary collaboration between security professionals, IT teams, and business leaders to proactively manage evolving cyber risks.
