ESG Blogs

2019 will be a year where businesses will need to adapt processes and people to technology that already exists in the market. My colleague Doug Cahill and I highlight multiple opportunities for businesses as they embrace ways to securely deliver applications and data to end-users. Listen in as we discuss:

• Device consolidation.
• The gig economy's impact on secure access.
• The increasing confidence in the native security capabilities of UEM platforms.

Its that time of the year again when we try to predict the future based on everything we have seen and heard over the course of the prior year (or years). This is a fun exercise that makes us put on our thinking caps and try to determine how new technologies or initiatives will help to shape the upcoming year.

Welcome to 2019 and as is the tradition at ESG, I have made a video blog with my predictions for 2019. 2018 had a number of very significant announcements that impact all areas of cloud. My predictions video covers three main areas.

First, I talked about how 2019 will be the year we see the expansion of the cloud into hybrid cloud. Both Amazon Web Services and Google made significant product announcements in this area in 2018 and it puts pressure on the incumbent leader, Microsoft, to respond.

In my most recent data protection conversations, I had the pleasure of meeting with a few industry leaders in the space of Data Protection working in very different companies and market segments. 

There is a fundamental misunderstanding in the market that SaaS providers will take care of backup and recovery, archiving, and compliance for you. While there are some exceptions…they pretty much won’t. It’s your problem as an end-user. You are in charge of your data but you are not in control. Someone used the term “Russian roulette” to describe this situation…it may be exaggerated, but you get the idea!

If you’ve read my columns over the past few years, you’ve seen a security operations effort I’ve been pushing called SOAPA (security operations and analytics platform architecture). I first conceived of SOAPA as an antidote for the existing security operations practice of relying on an army of independent and disconnected security tools. 

What will the cybersecurity landscape look like in 2019? My esteemed colleague Doug Cahill and I look into our crystal balls to forecast some big trends to look out for next year. In this video, Doug and I discuss data breaches, threats to critical infrastructure, malware based on artificial intelligence, securing the modern application stack, and cloud-scale security analytics.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) recently held their 2018 North America event in Seattle, Washington. This event was both KubeCon, for Kubernetes, but also CloudNativeCon, for all the other cloud native associated projects that the CNCF supports. The show has seen wild growth, going from 500 to 1000 to 4000 to over 8000 attendees in the four years of the show.

As part of a recent ESG research project, 340 enterprise cybersecurity, GRC, and IT professionals were asked to compare cyber risk management today with how it was two years ago. The data indicates that 39% of survey respondents believe that cyber risk management is significantly more difficult today than it was two years ago, while another 34% say that cyber risk management is somewhat more difficult today than it was two years ago.