In this article, we take a look at technology trends in 2021.
Most of the technology trends are a result of COVID-19, the disruption it caused, and the accelerated digital transformation that followed.
The outcome is a tech landscape that’s adopting innovation in three key areas:
● People centricity: Technology as a service of people, as the core of all business. ● Location autonomy: Technology that supports the increasingly remote landscape. ● Resilience: Technology that helps organizations adjust to any disruption.
As typical, all of the tech trends we’ll mention don’t operate independently. Instead, they build on each other, and cover multiple industries and facets of everyday life:
● Work ● Education ● Transportation ● Healthcare ● Retail ● Security ● And more
With that in mind, we’ve selected seven trends you need to watch out for.
Let’s take a look.
1. Internet of Behaviors
Internet of Behaviors (IoB) is a direct response to the disruption caused by COVID-19. As public and commercial organizations collect more data in both the physical and digital worlds, IoB could help them use that information to influence peoples’ behavior through feedback loops.
For example, institutions could apply IoB in education. Schools and universities could monitor students’ interaction with online courses and adjust the UI to reflect actual use in the remote classroom. As a result, IoB may enhance the learning experience in the New Normal.
2. Total experience
Total experience links different experiences to give organizations a more holistic view of how people want to interact with them and adjust those interactions according to desired business outcomes.
The total experience combines: ● Multi-experience ● Customer experience ● Employee experience ● User experience ● Product and service experience
By collecting this type of data and analyzing it with the use of AI, businesses can find out where all of these experiences intersect. In doing so, the role of technology in business can allow companies to take advantage of the disruptions caused by COVID-19, including remote work and virtual customers.
3. Privacy-enhancing computation
Privacy-enhancing computation is a new data-sharing system. It combines three cybersecurity tech innovations that allow rivalling organizations to share, process, and analyze data with zero risks to confidentiality.
Pharmacy researchers from rival companies have used this trend to develop treatments for COVID-19. But its application could spill into other industries, as well.
For example, in retail, rivalling businesses could share data to penetrate a new market or manage a takeover of a third party.
4. Distributed cloud
A distributed cloud is a cloud service that distributes the cloud to different physical locations, while the public cloud provider remains responsible for controlling, managing and operating it.
Bringing cloud services closer to the organization could improve the capabilities of their public cloud. For example, it could increase response time, reduce the cost of data, and help with regulations that determine where data is stored.
5. Anywhere operations
The anywhere operations model is “digital-first, remote-first” tech strategy. It allows customers, employees and partners to interact with an organization remotely.
For example, in e-commerce, online stores can allow customers to use click & collect if they don’t want their goods delivered at home. Or in finance, with mobile banks that transfer funds, open accounts, or handle payments without physical contact.
6. Cybersecurity mesh
The cybersecurity mesh is the next stage in the evolution of a “walled city” and a response to next-gen cyber-attacks.
It allows organizations to create a security framework around parameters specific to a person or object.
Cyber security providers already use it to encrypt data and keep systems safe by centralizing the way they enforce and distribute security policies.
7. Hyper Automation
As companies scrambled to accelerate their digital transformation in the wake of COVID-19, many of them did so without a clear strategy. Hyper Automation is a direct response to that problem.
Technically, hyper automation is the concept of automating all business activities, processes and operations with digital technologies. But instead of relying on a host of disconnected systems, hyper automation focuses on efficiency.
That means organizations have to create systems that are streamlined, optimized, connected, fast, and agile.
For example, many distributors rely on delivery management software. It enables them to control fulfilment throughout the lifecycle of every order and across the entire supply chain.
How will future technology affect business in the future?
This was our pick of the top seven technologies that will impact 2021. As technology changes over time, we’re sure more trends will emerge.
What will the influence of technology on consumption look like? What will be the up and coming role of technology post-COVID? And what will be the application of technology in business?
Only time will tell. All you can do for now is stay informed, and continue following our Demakis Technologies blog for the latest updates from the world of technology.
Digital transformation can be a real challenge, especially when it comes to security. And a multifaceted and fragmented technological landscape increases the challenge to secure critical data, intellectual property and brand image – your most valuable assets – safe.
Your environment requires a strong defense line
Tackle the threats and secure critical data
Everything valuable must be protected while ensuring availability to the organization and third parties as defined by you. Any downtime could have a direct impact on revenue and a negative effect on your brand image. Detection and reaction to threats in real-time is as essential to your organization as your managed security infrastructure.
Evaluate your options and your choices
Your growing cloud applications and critical data must be as secure as your on-premise equipment. The diversity of technologies within your infrastructure, from mobile to broadband, makes it hard to ensure the appropriate levels of security. It’s essential to protect your activities from Internet attacks and your internal network at the perimeter. Being tied to any one particular vendor or technology can be hazardous in the fast-paced environment of security.
Never forget the human factor
Security solutions should be user friendly with no impact on anyone’s productivity. They should be easy to manage for your IT security teams and provide secure access to your corporate resources and cloud applications. Your mobile fleet needs protection from the many emerging forms of attack that only an advanced detection mobile solution can provide.
If you’d like to learn more about cyber-threats and how to protect your business and to secure critical data, contact us here at Demakis Technologies.
Has your organization ever had to deal with ransomware, malware, virus infections, or cyberattack? This attack may have seen important services fail and meant employees couldn’t do their work for hours or even days.
It could even have blocked customers from accessing your digital or physical services. There’s a good chance this has already happened to you, given that the number of reports of cyber incidents has never been as high as it was last year.
The damage cyberattack does to organizations ranges from unauthorized access via a relatively simple hack to large-scale theft of sensitive data, resulting in prolonged downtime. Effective recovery costs a lot of money and damages the confidence of your customers and investors. Whatever happens, don’t let a cyberattack destroy your organization. Prevention is better than cure, but if it does happen, it’s important to act quickly and limit the consequences.
The Challenge for Companies
As an organization, you must always be able to count on having structurally secure access to all customer data and business-sensitive data, while at the same time respecting all market-related regulations, legislation, and company policy. Reducing costs also often plays a major role, especially at a time when IT teams need to do more than ever in terms of innovation, security, and optimization. That is the number-one challenge that CTOs, CIOs, and IT managers face today.
Affected by a Cyberattack?
If something does go wrong and your organization falls victim to a cyberattack, the often already overloaded IT staff work overtime to get the affected services and security back up and running as quickly as possible. These sorts of situations can be a frightening wake-up call, suddenly making everyone aware of the organization’s unexpectedly high vulnerability to cyberattacks.
This is when people start asking: how can we better secure our organization, employees, and customers against cyberattacks? And what’s the most cost-effective solution?
Managed Security Services Providers (MSSPs) provide structural security solutions against cyberattacks, including always up-to-date expertise in the latest cyber threats and appropriate solutions.
What is a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP)?
Because security threats are becoming increasingly common, many organizations are partnering with a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP), often in addition to their existing security program. MSSPs provide professional monitoring and management, protecting hardware and data from potential cyberattack.
A Managed Security Service Provider is a third party that manages and implements network security and other forms of security for organizations. This could include:
Blocking viruses and spam;
Managed Firewalls;
Detecting intrusion attempts;
Setting up and securing a virtual private network (VPN);
Implementing system changes or upgrades.
In addition, MSSPs continuously monitor the security devices and systems in the organization. Most MSSPs offer a wide range of services, including:
Device management;
Log monitoring and management;
Vulnerability management;
Consultancy services.
Managed Security Service Providers generally offer their services in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. This means that your organization doesn’t need any extra hardware or staff – and this has a number of major benefits! We’ve listed the eight main ones for you.
Eight major benefits of having an MSSP
1. MSSP lowers costs in many areas
Reduced training costs
Working with an MSSP results in major cost savings on training and ensures IT teams have up-to-date knowledge of cyber security and threats. You benefit directly from the expertise and experience of the MSSP.
Lower staffing costs
You also save on staffing costs. Using an MSSP means you don’t incur any costs for hiring one or more full-time InfoSec professionals. In addition, MSSPs continuously monitor security systems – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! You can’t even expect that from your best employees.
Lower investment costs
An MSSP spreads the fixed costs of investments in technology over a broad customer base. And as a customer, you benefit directly from these savings. With an MSSP, you save directly on the costs of your own hardware, applications, and experts.
No unexpected costs
An MSSP is the solution to a lot of your concerns, and it makes it clear what you have to do as an organization. After all, managing everything in-house means new rules and guidelines can come as a surprise, resulting in high unexpected costs when you need to hire industry and compliance experts.
2. More time to focus on your business
An MSSP frees up time, so you can work on the things that really move your business forward – no more continuously having to resolve incidents. Your IT teams can reclaim time to focus on developing things, such as new services (innovation), network-related optimisations, business roadmaps, and more.
3. Access to unique expertise and tools
Are your IT staff experts in cyber security? Do they know all the latest developments, techniques, and technologies that guarantee safety? IT security is a unique expertise area that requires continuous training and education. For many organizations, experienced and dedicated staff for IT security are not only expensive, but also difficult to find.
Gaining access to the best cyber security solutions and technologies is a key asset and incentive to start working with a Managed Security Services Provider. An MSSP also provides independent cyber-security advice; this isn’t the case for suppliers of hardware and tools.
One of the main benefits of working with a Managed Security Services Provider is the broad cyber-security expertise it offers, something that many companies don’t have in-house. Outsourcing this to a Managed Security Service Provider means you can be certain that a security expert will protect and manage your data properly. The certified employees of good MSSPs are always aware of developments in industry and in modern cyberattack.
Organizations that place their trust in an MSSP are often more effective at protecting their own organizations than when they rely on their own security teams alone. Of course, this doesn’t alter the fact that both teams have to make proper arrangements about how they communicate with one another.
4. Direct cyber security
IT teams themselves often don’t have time to keep up to date with the best next-generation firewalls or cyber-security topics, such as endpoint protection, phishing, and advanced threat prevention.
The good news is that as a partner of your company, an MSSP always has that knowledge at hand and applies it directly. From the moment an organization chooses a good MSSP, that expertise is immediately accessible: your MSSP is dedicated to ensuring the security of your network, endpoints, and data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is intelligent, always-on cyber security expertise!
5. Automatic detection and fixing of vulnerabilities
An MSSP takes a lot of work off your hands when it comes to detecting and fixing vulnerabilities. An MSSP can:
Structurally detect and reduce vulnerabilities in critical systems;
Proactively predict threats, especially and specifically for targeted cyberattack;
Automatically detect important offensive tactics and methods in critical systems;
Respond effectively and quickly;
Reduce the likelihood of an attack succeeding and becoming an ‘event’ that takes a lot of time to control.
6. Increase action-oriented insight and reduce alert fatigue
Day in, day out, IT professionals have to deal with countless security alerts originating from various security tools used within the company. Research by the Cloud Security Alliance shows that more than 31% of IT security specialists do not respond to these alerts, as most of them are false positives.
In short, alerts often fail in their purpose: they’re either not usable or don’t contain information that could be used to take action. This form of alert fatigue increases the likelihood that actual cyberattack will go unnoticed.
‘Over 31% of IT security specialists don’t respond to security alerts, due to the high number of false positives.’ – Source: research by The Cloud Security Alliance
Many cyber-security solutions cause integration problems when exchanging data, resulting in inefficient and ineffective data silos. MSSPs usually have integrated technical solutions that fully focus on action-oriented alerts.
So if your MSSP sends you alerts, these are hardly ever redundant or unusable.
Most MSSPs use technology of all types and sizes that in-house specialists have integrated over time for businesses. The MSSP therefore offers solutions that avoid situations where IT staff receive endless alerts, while at the same time increasing response efficiency. Moreover, thanks to the insights provided by an MSSP, you can set easily measurable goals for cyber security.
7. Scalability
Another benefit is that MSSPs can be scaled perfectly to your needs, and the required security IT infrastructure can be easily adapted. So if you temporarily need extra capacity, you simply scale up. Resources automatically grow with your capacity needs. And if you need to scale back at a later time, you can. MSSPs respond quickly.
8. Good guarantees and fast response times
Good MSSPs offer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) alongside their 24-hour, 7-days-a-week, 365-days-a-year support An SLA contains guidelines for customers on incident response times and guarantees in the event of security incidents.
In short, all potential risks associated with cyber threats are shifted from your organization to a specialized third party, the MSSP.
Conclusion
Cybercrime is evolving at an incredible pace, with even the largest international companies discovering vulnerable points in their security systems. Without proper protection, tracking these threats would take an awful lot of time and energy, not to mention manpower and salaries for qualified in-house IT specialists.
Today’s threat landscape poses a real risk to your sensitive data, profitability, and reputation. IT security is an ongoing activity that requires a clear understanding of how users, customers, and applications access data and how devices are configured. An MSSP is the solution and also provides Regular Cyber Security Assessments.
Cost savings
It’s often the cost that prevents a company from hiring MSSPs. But that’s a misconception. Hiring these providers usually saves your organization a lot of money:
Reducing costs after a cyber-security incident;
Fewer costs for hiring in-house experts and further training staff;
24-hour protection prevents intrusion and avoids costs;
No high investment costs;
Good prior insight into costs;
The insight an MSSP gives into cost savings is crucial.
An MSSP for your organization
Cyber security should support rather than hinder innovation and change. Manageable, flexible, resilient, and responsive protection gives your organization what it needs. If you are looking for best IT solutions for your company, be free to contact us at Demakis Technologies.
More and more organizations are investing their security budgets into managed security services. An evolving threat landscape requires skilled security talent and expertise yet there is a major imparity in finding qualified talent and a need to monitor and manage security events on a 24/7/365 basis. In this blog, we share how managed security services work as well as some key benefits of using a managed security service provider (MSSP).
What is Managed Security Services?
Managed security services include outsourced monitoring and management of your security systems and devices. An MSSP manages your Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) tools, Intrusion Detection Systems/Intrusion Prevention Systems, firewalls, anti-virus, vulnerability and compliance management, and more.
Organizations use MSSPs to offload the tedious work of managing and monitoring hundreds if not thousands of security incidents and events a day. If your organization lacks in-house security resources, the expertise, or the time to monitor and manage your security environment continuously then managed security services is a beneficial choice.
Fully- Managed vs. Co-Managed Security Services
There are two types of managed security services: Fully-managed and Co-managed security services.
Fully-Managed Services – the security services provider owns the security technologies and manages and monitors the security events generated from these tools and technologies. If your organization is budget conscious or if you don’t have internal resources to learn and manage an array of the latest technologies, then fully-managed security services are most likely a good fit.
Co-Managed – If your organization owns an array of security technologies and is short on internal security resources required to manage these solutions on a 24x7x365 basis, then co-managed security services are beneficial. You can eventually bring the monitoring and management of technologies back in-house as your organization scales and you build a Security Operations Center (SOC).
An MSSP can educate and inform you about each tool’s features, functionality, and set up the best configuration. In addition, co-managed security services allow your staff to focus on other strategic security projects and offload the intensive job of monitoring and managing events during non-business hours. Hence, why many MSSPs offer 24x7x365 coverage.
Threat Monitoring & Management
Today’s security landscape requires continuous monitoring and investigation of threats. Security data is collected from a variety of sources, and an MSSP can use this to identify correlations in your security incidents, ultimately, pinpointing anomalies and malicious activity.
A team of security analysts at an MSSP will evaluate your security data and determine if these incidents should be turned into security events with alerts. If so, tickets are opened and notifications performed per a collection of escalation profiles, which set a priority and notify appropriately, forming an incident response playbook for your organization.
A managed security services provider should also have security analysts trained to threat hunt. According to Carbon Black, a leading provider of Next-Gen Endpoint Protection, threat hunting is:
“The active pursuit of abnormal activity on servers and endpoints that may be signs of compromise.”
A common approach for many organizations with in-house security teams is to simply wait for an alert. With threat hunting, the security provider actively looks for network activity, Indicators of Compromise, and unusual endpoint activity. The analysts at the MSSP will not wait for alerts or security incidents but rather proactively look for anomalies and malicious activities.
Incident Response and Event Investigation
Once a security alert is created, the MSSP team will work on remediating the incident. Your internal team may be overwhelmed with other essential security tasks. Offloading incident response to a provider allows your organization to accelerate handling incidents that before could require multiple shifts or even days to fix.
Consider the time it may take to patch software, push out new AV signatures, investigate all aspects of the security event, and communicate a security breach to your employees and customers (if necessary). A third tier IR team can contain threats and minimize the duration and impact of a security incident by employing a team of skilled analysts that have worked on multiple customer environments.
Security Intelligence
Security intelligence can come from open and private sources and helps an organization improve its detection and response activities. If your organization is unable to dedicate full-time staff to threat intelligence gathering, then managed security services is beneficial.
A leading MSSP can offer relevant threat intelligence for enabling security technologies, monitoring and reporting to your organization. Threat Intelligence provides the security team the insights needed to proactively hunt threats.
For small to large organizations, the benefit of threat intelligence from an MSSP is that it’s based on a wide variety of scenarios across its entire client base, to have it analyzed by knowledgeable security specialists that can determine how it may impact your organization in the short term and long-term.
Also, with a full array of security technologies and clients in-house, the managed security provider offers your organization insights into global threats in real-time. An MSSP gives your organization an advantage when defending against zero-day threats, new vulnerabilities, and ransomware that can easily evade detection.
Perhaps this year you might consider fully-managed or co-managed security services and offload your strenuous workload of security tasks to an MSSP.
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