Canadian Security Magazine

2023: A year for proactive security

By Darren Yablonski   

News Data Security commvault editors pick

A top, if not the top IT priority for organizations in 2023 will most certainly be cybersecurity. With that in mind, below are some thoughts and predictions from me and my colleague, Matt Tyer, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager and Head of Competitive Intelligence at Commvault, about what we might see in the year ahead.

Security in the Cloud and Beyond

Significant amounts of IT budget spend will be allocated and invested in technologies to prevent, detect and recover from inevitable cyberattacks not if, but when they occur. As cloud adoption in a SaaS (Software as a Service) model continues to proliferate the market, organizations will leverage solutions that provide proven peace of mind knowing their data is safe and recoverable in a timely fashion. Trust will be given to organizations that can clearly articulate cybersecurity best practices that align to a customer specific use case and objectives.

Emerging technologies and trends will be inclusive of both AI (artificial intelligence) and automation. Organizations typically have predictable network and data usage patterns. As data continues to grow exponentially within the realm of the “internet of things” and those patterns deviate within a network or data repository, humans simply cannot keep track of anomalies in real time. As such, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions that collect, process, analyze and report threats in an expedited and accurate manner will continue to become more ubiquitous. Integration and adoption of such technologies within a zero-trust architecture will be of greater top of mind for CISOs and security specialists as the years progress.

As mentioned earlier, data consumption will continue to flow from on premise to cloud applications using a SaaS model depending on use case. Hybrid solutions, both on-prem and cloud-based, will continue to exist for a number of years as companies look to both balance and ensure data immutability and speed of recovery in the most cost effective manner. As new regulations continue to evolve specific to data security practices, data management solutions that provide a complete and comprehensive set of tools addressing those practices will also evolve. In summary, as the threat landscape in IT continues to grow and increase in complexity, organizations attempting to address this complexity for customers will focus on developing more diverse and broad software solutions that simplify recoverability and accurate reporting regardless of where that data resides.

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Increased Focus on Earlier Threat Prevention

With the number of cyber threats increasing, businesses will need and begin to implement with more frequency proactive solutions to constantly monitor their environment to catch threats and enable early warning/response. Bad guys are getting in, and we aren’t knowing about it early enough.

From a cyber security and threat defence perspective the industry today could be essentially divided in two:

  1. Reactive Players: These tend to be the storage and most backup vendors who are focused on protecting the data itself. Aiming to ensure it is available for recovery via table stakes features like immutability and anomaly detection (threat hunting) in the backups. These solutions are the sprinkler system and fire alarm – by the time they are triggered your house is already on fire and your only response is triage and disaster recovery.
  2. Preventative Players: These vendors are your perimeter defence vendors like firewalls, anti-virus, SIEM/SOAR tools, along with other data loss prevention (DLP) and intrusion detection/prevention solutions. Even the newer identity access management (IAM) security vendors, who are adding key security functionality to control who can see what in your environment, can be grouped in here. They are all the locks on your doors and windows actively working to keep the bad guys out of the house so that they can’t even start the fire.

Don’t get me wrong, both of these are critical parts of a layered security posture and strategy. There is no “silver bullet,” despite some of the rhetoric and marketing out there. This has been stressed by many in the market, including industry leaders and analysts who all agree that “security is a team sport.”

This is why we’re also predicting an industry wide shift to more PROACTIVE warning systems.

Bad actors are penetrating the outer defences with greater success, and the reactive players just aren’t providing an early enough warning to trigger a response before it’s too late. How can you better catch trouble in between these two systems? This is where newer technologies like cyber deception come into play. These systems are actively seeking to trick and trap malware and bad actors earlier in their intrusions – thus enabling faster responses and mitigation of the damage. Essentially catching the match before it’s lit.

Malware is constantly evolving, and our defences must as well. Implementing technologies that shift our ability to detect and respond to these threats earlier in the timeline will be the next key phase in the ongoing battle to protect our data.

Darren Yablonski is a Senior Director of Sales Engineering leading teams in Canada, U.S. and LATAM at Commvault.


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