This post is part of our 2023 cybersecurity prediction series.
Jadee Hanson, CIO and CISO, Code42
Budget cuts, amid economic uncertainty, will leave companies vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Once rumblings of economic uncertainty begin, wary CFOs will begin searching for areas of superfluous spending to cut in order to keep their company ahead of the game. For the uninformed C-suite, cybersecurity spend is sometimes seen as an added expense rather than an essential business function that helps protect the company’s reputation and bottom line. These organizations may try to cut spending by decreasing their investment in cybersecurity tools or talent - effectively lowering their company’s ability to properly detect or prevent data breaches and opening them up to potentially disastrous outcomes. This should especially be of concern amid persistent ransomware attacks, and 2023 is expected to be another challenging year. Companies that maintain efficient cybersecurity resources will fare much better in the long run than those who make widespread cuts.
Nathan Hunstad, Deputy CISO, Code42
Continued rise in cloud collaboration tech usage will cause more company data exposures.
Remote work isn’t going anywhere - in fact, we’re seeing signs that today’s job market is trending toward a situation where the candidate pool includes the entire world, no matter the location. At the same time, our workforce is more transient than it has been previously because employees are changing jobs multiple times throughout the span of their careers. This combination means corporate data is more vulnerable than ever in the coming year. Cloud technology isn’t infallible, and employees may utilize unauthorized tools to get their jobs done faster and easier. Job hopping also lends itself to more data exfiltration as people leave and take data with them, whether with malicious intentions or not. In fact, our data has shown there’s a one in three chance your company loses IP when an employee quits, and nearly three-quarters (71%) of organizations are unaware of how much sensitive data their departing employees typically take with them. To account for this, we’ll almost certainly see security teams revamping protocols in 2023 with these new data exfiltration capabilities in mind.
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