Six cybersecurity trends for 2024

Gartner lists six ways the cybersecurity market will be influenced and impacted this year

Cybersecurity remains a top priority for both vendors and channel partners alike.

Cyber threats continue to loom over the heads of businesses as security approaches need to be proactive over reactive more than ever.

Analyst house Gartner has listed six trends that will make an impact on the cybersecurity market this year.

Generative AI - Short-term scepticism but long-term hope

Gartner says security leaders need to prepare for the swift evolution of GenAI, as large language model (LLM) applications like ChatGPT and Gemini are only the start of its disruption.

Meanwhile, security bosses are overwhelmed with promises of productivity increases, skills gap reductions and other new benefits for cybersecurity.

Gartner recommends using GenAI through proactive collaboration with business stakeholders to support the foundations for the ethical, safe and secure use of this disruptive technology.

"It's important to recognise that this is only the beginning of GenAI's evolution, with many of the demos we've seen in security operations and application security showing real promise," said Richard Addiscott, senior director analyst at Gartner.

"There's solid long-term hope for the technology, but right now we're more likely to experience prompt fatigue than two-digit productivity growth. Things will improve, so encourage experiments and manage expectations, especially outside of the security team."

Outcome-driven metrics will ease boardroom anxiety

The frequency and negative impact of cybersecurity incidents on organisations continues to rise, undermining the confidence of the board and executives in their cybersecurity strategies.

Gartner believes outcome-driven metrics (ODMs) are increasingly being adopted to enable stakeholders to draw a straight line between cybersecurity investment and the delivered protection levels it generates.

The analyst firm says ODMs are central to creating a defensible cybersecurity investment strategy, reflecting agreed protection levels with powerful properties, and in simple language that is explainable to non-IT executives.

Security behaviour will change to reduce human risks

Security leaders recognise that shifting focus from increasing awareness to fostering behavioural change will help reduce cybersecurity risks.

By 2027, Gartner predicts 50 per cent of large enterprise CISOs will have adopted human-centric security design practices to minimise cybersecurity-induced friction and maximise control adoption.

Security behaviour and culture programs (SBCPs) encapsulate an enterprisewide approach to minimising cybersecurity incidents associated with employee behaviour.

More resilience-oriented investments, less front loaded due diligence activities

The inevitability of third parties experiencing cybersecurity incidents is pressuring security leaders to focus more on resilience-oriented investments and move away from front loaded due diligence activities, Gartner says.

The researcher recommends security leaders enhance risk management of third-party services and establish mutually beneficial relationships with important external partners, to ensure their most valuable assets are continuously safeguarded.

"Start by strengthening contingency plans for third-party engagements that pose the highest cybersecurity risk," said Addiscott.

"Create third-party-specific incident playbooks, conduct tabletop exercises and define a clear offboarding strategy involving, for example, timely revocation of access and destruction of data."

Continuous threat exposure management programs gain momentum

According to Gartner, continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) is a pragmatic and systemic approach organisations can use to continually evaluate the accessibility, exposure and exploitability of digital and physical assets.

Aligning assessment and remediation scopes with threat vectors or business projects rather than an infrastructure component, highlights vulnerabilities and unpatchable threats.

By 2026, Gartner predicts that organisations prioritising their security investments based on a CTEM program will realise a two-thirds reduction in breaches.

Extending the role of identity & access management to improve cybersecurity outcomes

As more organisations move to an identity-first approach to security, the focus shifts from network security and other traditional controls to IAM, making it critical to cybersecurity and business outcomes.

While Gartner sees an increased role for IAM in security programs, practices must evolve to focus more on fundamental hygiene and hardening of systems to improve resilience.

Gartner recommends security leaders focus on strengthening and leveraging their identity fabric and leverage identity threat detection and response to ensure IAM capabilities are best positioned to support the breadth of the overall security program.