In the past year, COVID-19 has had a bigger impact on work habits and security environments than the other health emergency in memory. That combined with technological advances like 5G has led to many trends we expect to ascertain during this New Year .
An increase in attacks on remote infrastructure. due to the pandemic, we saw a huge increase within the number of workers moving from centralized locations to home offices; this, in turn, has led to a rise within the employment of technologies facilitating remote work, like email, VPN, and remote desktop (RDP). In many cases, workers began working remotely so quickly that organizations didn’t have enough time to completely consider security implications. This created an increased attack landscape, during which criminals understand the weak points and the way to maximize them, particularly with VPN. Sadly, we’ve seen several compromises already and expect to ascertain this continue. Suffice to mention , companies must specialize in securing both their VPN and RDP infrastructures.
Smart devices will evolve from connected’ to autonomous. Smart cities, smart manufacturing, smart transport, and logistics will invest to become more autonomous. Smart devices used for automation in manufacturing plants, transport, and logistics will become more autonomous, with more built-in intelligence and fewer full-time connection. This may have an impression on latency, availability of connection, and security issues. The latency issue may be of the centralized cloud services, which may take longer than is right for real-time systems to react to things occurring within the physical world. Likewise, a loss of connectivity for any number of reasons (power outage, cloud down, cyberattack) can impact smart devices that aren’t autonomous. And therefore the more you’re connected and interact with external services, the upper security exposure to attack. As such, we’ll see more smart systems which will move by themselves, using connections primarily for remote monitoring. Intelligence are going to be provided by MEC and edge cloud services, and 5G’s blazing speed are going to be a critical driver for smart collaboration between systems.
The internet will become one large interconnected service factory. We’re moving towards APIs for web applications, with organizations taking some services and placing them in several interconnected clouds. this is often the start of a full mesh of interconnected services from the sting to central clouds, effectively creating a full meshed hierarchy. the danger is that if one component fails, then the entire system is impacted. Centralization in major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and DNS increases the probability for giant scale outages. Expect to ascertain more within the coming year.