Top-8 Cyber Security Predictions for 2023 & Beyond: Gartner

As per Gartner’s top cyber security predictions, executive performance evaluations will increasingly be linked to the ability to manage cyber risk; nearly one-third of nations will regulate ransomware response within the next three years; and security platform consolidation will help organizations thrive in hostile environments.

Here are the top cyber security predictions:

Government legislation mandating firms to provide consumer privacy rights will cover 5 billion persons and more than 70 percent of global GDP by 2023.

The ramifications of new GDPR-centric privacy legislation imply that enterprises no longer have the luxury of only being concerned with what is stored in the country in which they operate. According to Gartner researchers, enterprises should create a comprehensive awareness of the privacy landscape, analyze, and use privacy-enhancing computation to assist preserve privacy and confidentiality through automation. In order to uncover inefficiencies and justify rapid automation, they will also need to track subject rights request metrics.

By 2025, 80 percent of businesses will have implemented a strategy to combine web, cloud, and private application access through a single vendor’s SSE platform.

Vendors are proposing an integrated security service edge (SSE) solution to ensure consistent and simple web, private access, and SaaS application security in the face of a hybrid workforce and data everywhere accessible by everything. When compared to best-of-breed solutions, single-vendor solutions provide significant operational efficiency and security effectiveness, including tighter integration, fewer consoles to use, and fewer sites where data must be decrypted, reviewed, and re-encrypted.

By 2025, 60 percent of enterprises will use zero trust as a starting point for security. More than half will not reap the rewards.

The term “zero trust” is now widely used in security vendor marketing and government security guidelines. It is incredibly strong as a mentality, replacing implicit trust with identity- and context-based risk-appropriate trust. However, because zero trust is both a security principle and an organizational vision, achieving the benefits would necessitate a culture transformation and effective communication that links it to commercial goals.

By 2025, 60 percent of enterprises will consider cyber security risk as a primary factor in third-party transactions and business engagements.

Third-party cyber-attacks are becoming more common. According to Gartner statistics, only 23 percent of security and risk leaders monitor third parties in real-time for cyber security vulnerability. Gartner predicts that as a result of consumer concerns and regulatory interest, organizations will begin to mandate cyber security risk as a significant determinant when conducting business with third parties, ranging from simple monitoring of a critical technology supplier to complex due diligence for mergers and acquisitions.

By 2025, 30 percent of nation-states will have passed legislation governing ransomware payments, fines, and talks, up from less than 1 percent in 2021.

Modern ransomware gangs now take data in addition to encrypting it. The decision to pay or not pay the ransom is a business decision, not a security one. Before negotiating, Gartner recommends involving a professional incident response team, as well as law enforcement and any regulatory bodies.

Threat actors will have successfully weaponized operational technology settings to cause human deaths by 2025.

OT (hardware and software that monitors or controls equipment, assets, and processes) attacks are becoming more widespread and disruptive. According to Gartner, in operational contexts, security and risk management professionals should be more concerned with real-world threats to humans and the environment than with information theft.

By 2025, 70 percent of CEOs will have mandated a culture of organizational resilience in order to withstand concurrent risks such as cybercrime, catastrophic weather catastrophes, civil unrest, and political instabilities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed typical business continuity management planning’s incapacity to assist an organization’s response to a large-scale disruption. Gartner suggests that risk leaders understand organizational resilience as a strategic priority and develop an organization-wide resilience strategy that includes workers, stakeholders, customers, and suppliers.

By 2026, 50 percent of C-level executives’ employment contracts will include risk-related performance objectives.

Most boards now see cyber security as a commercial concern, not just a technical IT issue. As a result, Gartner analysts anticipate a shift in formal accountability for cyber risk management from the security leader to top business leaders.