The past decade has seen a major transformation in the realm of enterprise network and security.  The traditional data center approach no longer fits the changing landscape that we are in today. With cloud-based security solutions and with the pandemic elevating the need to work and access devices and applications virtually, the need for enterprise network security to become more agile and adapt accordingly has become more important than ever. 

According to Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud report, for the 5th year in a row, optimizing cloud is the top initiative for the year ahead, with migrating more workloads to the cloud a close second.

Even if your business doesn’t operate 24/7, chances are your IT infrastructure does. Consider Sentia’s Managed services to meet the unique needs of your business.

As we begin a new year, one trend that will only grow in importance is the critical need for cyber security measures. The Canadian manufacturing sector is known for its advances in digital technologies to enhance the automation of critical processes. Currently, at least 97% of Canadian industrial markets utilize data analytics to drive daily business operations, inform crucial decisions, and develop new products. While this is a step in the right direction, most industry leaders in the Canadian manufacturing sector fail to take cybersecurity with the utmost seriousness and concerns. 

Higher education institutions, especially polytechnics, universities, and colleges, are vulnerable to numerous cyber threats and attacks. According to Isaac Straley, the chief information security officer at the University of Toronto, securing higher education institutions is challenging due to a complex cybersecurity landscape. "We do so many things in higher education. The social landscape is quite complex, teaching and learning; we have information about people, our students, our staff, our donors. And we also have intellectual property that we are generating," Straley says.

Cyber security breaches targeting Canadian organizations almost doubled in the recent past. Various sectors, including the Canadian legal industry, are thus required to enhance their data protection, and cyber security controls to protect their firms from attacks. Robust cyber security is vital in securing employee and customer data from known and unknown threats. In this regard, 90% of Canadian legal professionals believe their firms need to implement strong data protection and cyber security measures to secure sensitive information.

Recent incidents show that security breaches and cyber attacks have steadily increased across Canada and globally, with healthcare service providers seen as a prime target. Needless to say, healthcare organizations are greater targets for data theft than organizations in other sectors for various reasons. For example, there was a 37 percent increase in attack rate per healthcare organization throughout 2020 and the beginning of 2021. In effect, organizations need to implement proper security controls to prevent harmful and costly attacks

How can we secure the processes, facilities, technologies, systems, assets, networks, and services essential to the safety, health, or economic well-being of Canadians? How can we enhance the cybersecurity posture for critical infrastructure that can be interconnected and interdependent within and across provinces, territories, and national borders? Cyber-attacks and disruption of critical infrastructure could result in catastrophic loss of life, adverse economic effects, and harm to public confidence, as is the case with the Colonial Pipeline hack.

2021 has been a busy year for cybercriminals. The year is not yet over, and the number of publicly-reported data compromises through September 30, 2021, has exceeded the total number of events in full-year 2020 by 17 percent, according to the Identity Theft Research Center data breach analysis. A new report from IBM Security revealed the average cost of a data breach in Canada was $6.75 million per incident in the 2021 survey year. On all levels, this could be a record-breaking year for data breaches. That's up from $6.35 million the year before, and the highest since the survey included Canada seven years ago.

The world is slowly beginning to reopen, and organizations are making decisions on what the post-pandemic workplace looks like. As many organizations look to bring their staff back into the office, others will opt for hybrid models or stick with full-time remote teams. Currently, millions of employees in Canada work from home full time with no end in sight, and many employees wish to continue working remotely once the pandemic ends

Peculiarly, the language used by senior management in quarterly earnings calls with investors and analysts placed the remote work discussion central in the public companies' earnings calls in 2021. This discussion was perceptibly limited in the years before 2020, and it is not a stretch to say that modern history will reference the year as a turning point. Many CEOs now view remote work in a favorable light, a sign that it is here to stay. Some companies that have announced they will allow, encourage, or require employees to work from home permanently include Shopify, Twitter, Facebook, Square, Coinbase, Upwork, AWeber, Otis, and Amazon.

As the famous Charles Dickens quote goes, "we are in the best of times, yet we are also in the worst of times". On one side, organizations, and users alike, benefit from the emergence of new technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), and so on. On the other side, there has been a rise in recent successes scored against high-profile targets, including the world’s largest meat processing company, JBS, that shut down facilities in the United States, Canada, and Australia after an attack.

Meanwhile, since the pandemic started, bad actors have been exploiting the vulnerabilities of organizations moving to remote working strategies. On the other side, security professionals have worked tirelessly to mitigate the threats, and vendors are delivering new and reliable technologies to support their efforts.

Based on the information and analysis from our professionals, here are the top five security and risk trends we think are worth watching as we go into 2022 and ways Sentia helps organizations stay prepared for the possibility of threats.