In ISACA, the global nonprofit IT association has issued guidance on managing three top trends expected to pose major challenges to businesses in 2013: cybersecurity threats, private vs. public clouds and data privacy. As part of its role as a provider of best practices and expertise, ISACA aims to help its 100,000 constituents worldwide navigate the shifting IT landscape in order to build trust in and value from enterprise information.
Increasingly Sophisticated Cybersecurity Threats
Viruses that send unsolicited emails and attack web sites, as well as search engine poisoningwhere unwitting users are misdirected toward questionable or fraudulent sitesare among the increasingly sophisticated tactics used to capture and exploit consumer data and pose threats to international supply chains.
Jeff Spivey, international vice president of ISACA and director of Security Risk Management says that in the future, as more devices utilize IP addresses, the attack surface will become larger and threats to cyber security will increase. Cyber criminals will dedicate themselves to finding increasingly complex methods for attacks in 2013.
According to ISACAs Cybercrime Audit/Assurance Program, cybercrime is not just an IT issue; it is a business issue. ISACA recommends that management address cybercrime across all areas, including: Awareness, Prevention, Detection, Incident management, Crisis management, Cooperation with investigating organizations.
Debate over Private vs. Public Cloud
Over the next 12 months, information security concerns will prompt a growing interest in private or hybrid (public/private) cloud solutions. The expected rise of personal clouds will add to the challenge of protecting data for a mobile workforce that embraces BYOD (bring your own device). Cost, speed, manageability and security are the factors most debated in cloud computing.
ISACAs 2012 IT Risk/Reward Barometer shows that IT professionals remain wary of public clouds; 69 per cent believe that the risk of using public clouds outweighs the benefit. Opinions of private clouds are the oppositethe majority (57%) believes the benefit outweighs the risk. Other findings include:
- Among people using cloud for mission-critical services, there is a 25-point difference between those who use private (34%) versus public (9%).
- One of the high-risk actions employees take online is using an online file-sharing service, such as Dropbox or Google Docs, for work documents (67%).
- The most effective way to reduce IT risk is to educate employees (36%).
Despite these concerns, CFOs (to whom over half of CIOs report) still look to cloud for return on investment.
In the cloud debate, the trump card will often be played by the business-line leader responsible for customer satisfaction and profitable revenue. To shape the solution, IT leaders can push aside the hype and broadly evaluate risk and returnthrough the eyes of the business, said Brian Barnier, principal analyst at ValueBridge Advisors and a risk advisor with ISACA.
Growing Privacy Concerns
In the coming year, IT professionals will have to manage not just threats of data leakage and identity theft, but also growing consumer and employee concerns about data privacy.
The protection of personally identifiable information (PII) is the responsibility of both organizations and individuals, said Greg Grocholski, CISA, international president of ISACA and chief audit executive at The Dow Chemical Company. Organizations need to have a governance structure in place to ensure that PII is managed and protected throughout its life cycle. Individuals must be aware of what PII they are providing and to whom. To be successful, data protection must be a joint effort.
He continued, Privacy by design, confidentiality of location-based information, the consumerization of IT, and an increase in legislative and regulatory mandates that will drive more privacy audits are among the top 2013 trends in data privacy that ISACA anticipates will need to be addressed.
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