Identity will be the common thread running through the prevailing cybersecurity trends in 2022. As these trends play out, identity-related capabilities like authentication, identity governance and lifecycle management will be increasingly relevant to the cybersecurity challenges that organizations will face this year, and to the strategies they’ll adopt to address them.
Broadly, SecurID experts see two major trends pushing identity to the center of cybersecurity:
To understand what makes identity so critical to cybersecurity now, think about how people are engaging digitally these days:
- After a year defined by remote work, when people moved out of the office en masse, we are seeing organizations shift to a hybrid environment. In some cases, parts of the workforce are back in the office while the rest continue to work off-site; in others, everyone may be back at the office on some days and off-site the rest of the time.
- As people shift to working away from the office, they’re understandably relying more on mobile technology and cloud apps to get work done, rather than the secure business laptops and desktops that had for so long defined office work.
- With the line between work and private life blurring, people are becoming impatient with having to switch back and forth between the tools and apps they use in their professional lives and the ones they use at home—i.e., accessing data and apps with one set of tools for work and another for leisure.
The identity-driven trends we’re seeing in cybersecurity today are directly related to the changes in how and why people access their personal and professional resources:
- Zero trust—the “never trust, always verify” approach to establishing trust—is gaining traction as remote/hybrid work and other changes continue to erode the corporate perimeter. Previously, that perimeter was the basis on which organizations assigned trust; now, they need a new way to authenticate users.
- Modern MFA—including passwordless and other nontraditional methods of authentication—is becoming critical to meeting the increasingly urgent need for access that is as convenient as it is secure
- Identity governance—and the visibility into access and entitlements that it affords—is increasingly recognized as essential to managing access, including securing access to vulnerable unstructured data such as PII and IP.
Learn more about the trends that are making 2022 the year of identity in this new e-book from SecurID.
