Security Trends That Will Impact Your Data in 2016

As expected, technology forecasts and predictions for 2016 continue to come in at a brisk pace now, with the latest concerning data protection and cybersecurity.

Haiyan Song, senior vice president, security markets, at Splunk, offered Information Management her thoughts this week on what will be the top security trends that data professionals and cybersecurity managers need to be aware of. Splunk is a market-leading platform that powers operational intelligence.

According to Song, top security trends will include:

Behavioral analysis

Behavioral analysis will shift from an emphasis on user credentials to machine-to-machine credentials, Song believes. Behavioral analytics and anomaly detection will become less about analyzing users or entities and more about leveraging machine learning and data science.

In addition, Song says the growth of micro services and containerization will lead to an emphasis on machine and service-level credentials rather than human credentials.

Threat intelligence

Organizations will begin producing their own threat intelligence, and cybersecurity operations will grow and become a competitive advantage, Song predicts.

“While security has been seen as a cost or even impediment to the business, companies will begin to cite cybersecurity as a competitive advantage. As we enter an era of information sharing in the cyber age, this dedicated threat intelligence operations within organizations will help fuel cybersecurity information sharing,” Song explains.

Automation and incident response

Automation and incident response will grow within security solutions, Song says. Specifically, security analytics and anomaly detection will be about automating and making it less dependent on humans, letting companies detect threats and respond without having to hire skilled analysts.

Also, incident response will become a larger part of organizations' security solutions, including automating the remediation.

Internet of Things

The IoT will become a “significant threat surface for the enterprise, leading to more physical disruption and new solutions,” Song says. “Internet-connected systems will create opportunities for hacktivists and terrorist organizations to access and productize information, and businesses will have to adapt to manage this new threat surface.”

Song notes that cyber-attacks have historically caused little physical damage, but “the proliferation of IoT will cause more disruption and actual physical damage versus just hardware and software disruption,” she says.

Personally identifiable information

“The explosion of personally identifiable information (PII) in the public sphere will lead to new means to improve identity authentication,” Song says. “Identity and compromised credentials as a new attack surface will attract a lot of development and innovation in terms of strengthening authentication.”

Furthermore, rather than multi-factored authentication, there will be a push to get away from methods such as passwords and authentication will become sophisticated but also easy to use, Song concludes.