GARTNER SPEAKS ON CYBER SECURITY TRENDS FOR 2016 AND 2017: ARE PREDICTIONS CONSISTENT WITH WHAT RSM CLIENTS EXPERIENCE?

Against a backdrop of what may be the most exciting and dynamic, yet challenging time in cyber security and arguably technology in general, Gartner provides its perspective on six new industry trends it predicts will take center stage moving into 2016 and 2017. Since RSM’s Security and Privacy consultants partner with clients in this same environment every day, we wondered—do we agree with Gartner, or would we choose other trends more relevant to our clients’ experiences? And what do you—our readers—think?

Within the larger context of our new digital future—the unparalleled scale and speed of which is literally too enormous to comprehend—this blog seeks to isolate only one area for consideration by our readers. We’ll first bring you six of Gartner’s top predictions in cyber security for the next two years, followed by assessment and commentary on what RSM is (and isn’t) seeing validated in our own client environments within the middle market. The six cyber security trends for 2016-2017 in the world according to Gartner are comprised of:

1. Worlds Collide: Gartner predicts 2016 will usher in a new era of cyber security in which boundaries and delineations between the digital and physical worlds increasingly converge, requiring a fundamental rethinking of the traditional cyber security model.
2. Software Defined: According to Gartner, application and platform security will become the newest members of the “software-defined” movement as we enter 2016, enabling organizations to meet new requirements for management flexibility and capability as well as use across multiple vendors and security policy pools.
3. Out with the Old, In with the New: 2016 will bring with it a shift toward development of more adaptive security architectures, says Gartner, in which reliance on traditional security tools is relinquished in favor of threat detection and response mechanisms.
4. All Things Cloud: With growing business requirements for scalability, diversity, and processing driving ever-more businesses to the cloud, Gartner predicts cloud security services have evolved in capability to the point that they are increasingly considered to be acceptable for organizations of all sizes (though not every organization).
5. A New Identity: Gartner predicts 2016 will see the emergence of new concepts incorporated into the traditional definition of “identity,” which will come to include attribute data not only on people but also on devices (e.g., locations, models) and applications (e.g., software versions, prior use data)
6. An Idea Whose Time Has Come?: As the last of its top-tier cyber security trends, Gartner predicts its concept of “People-Centric Security” will begin to gain both increased consideration and broader adoption into 2016, redefining traditional views on how much security should be applied to non-critical data, and freeing finite security resources to focus on IAM considerations around critical data.

RSM will speak on whether Garner’s predications and trends are validated by clients in the middle-market space in the next series of blog posts.

Daimon Geopfert