Cybersecurity Trends 2023

Even among IT professionals who ought to know better, investing in new cybersecurity solutions is often a bit like buying life insurance. It’s something people know they ought to do but often put off, in part because they don’t want to think about the threats that makes the purchase a necessity. 

As we round the corner into a new year, we’re starting to see more organizations finally adopt underused cybersecurity tools that have been around for a while, as well as some emerging solutions. Here are six cybersecurity trends that I see building steam in 2023.

As organizations continue to increase their volume of cloud-native production workloads, business and IT leaders are beginning to ask more questions about how they can adequately protect their data in these environments. Stakeholders are looking toward solutions that tie together their on-premises and public cloud environments and provide the same data protection capabilities, regardless of where applications and data are housed.

This is one of those “we’re still talking about this?” topics. Unfortunately, the answer is yes, we still need to talk about this. Multifactor authentication and strong data encryption of at least 256-bit AES  is a simple, affordable way to thwart a large portion of attacks aimed at compromising and exploiting user credentials. Yet, according to some estimates, only about 1 in 10 organizations currently uses MFA and strong encryption for both on-premises, in-flight and in-cloud data storage and protection. As ransomware and other cyberthreats continue to grow in the coming year, I expect MFA adoption will increase as a best practice.

In contrast to MFA and strong data encryption — both well-established but underutilized cybersecurity tools — anomaly detection is an emerging capability. By working with metadata, anomaly detection tools can help organizations discover suspicious behavior that might otherwise go unnoticed, and then identify the initial source and scope of infection. Two years ago, these tools didn’t exist, but I expect more organizations will adopt them as cybersecurity stakeholders see how powerful they can be in determining indicators of compromise during root cause investigations and highlighting initial infection points to assist with recovery of clean data.

These two terms are often mistakenly used interchangeably; in fact, they’re distinct concepts. Immutable data typically refers to data that cannot be altered, whereas indelible data is information that cannot be deleted. While most traditional databases store data in a mutable format that allows the database to overwrite old data when new data is available, organizations are now turning to solutions that offer data immutability and indelibility to safeguard data stores from hackers.

Traditional anti-virus isn’t cutting it anymore, and IT leaders are increasingly adopting endpoint detection and response tools to take its place. EDR solutions typically feature endpoint active-threat detection and alerting, incident investigation, incident containment and incident response.

The dramatic rise in cyberattacks in recent years has caused IT leaders to rethink their approach to disaster recovery. Even in high-availability, redundant environments that work well in the case of a natural disaster, threats like ransomware might be lurking in the secondary environment, preventing organizations from recovering downed systems. As a result, clean backups have become a more important part of DR, and many organizations are turning to Disaster Recovery as a Service,  or DraaS, in a physically or logically separated vault service. 

With so much to choose from, business and IT leaders may be unsure which options are best suited to their environment. In that case, an assessment from a trusted partner like CDW may be the first step to a happy — and safe — New Year.

Story by Lewis Cox, a Distinguished Field Solutions Architect with CDW focused on hybrid infrastructure. He has 35 years of experience in the IT industry and currently supports the Wisconsin market across all verticals and sales segments.