Posted by New Delhi: Futurex, an enterprise-class data security solutions provider unveiled its top data security predictions for 2023 and beyond. The predictions investigate emerging trends in cryptography that lie at the heart of network protection innovations and developing issues as more devices and infrastructure connect to the web.
“The demand for data security solutions is at an all-time high. Never before has the world seen the large-scale deployment of these solutions across enterprises,” said Adam Cason, VP of Global and Strategic Alliances, Futurex.
“With the evolving data security landscape, there is a critical need for solution providers to produce breakthrough innovations that meet the cybersecurity needs of clients and allow them to focus on their key business. This requires an understanding of what has changed, followed by a review of how to respond to that change,” added Cason.
The top data security predictions for 2023 and beyond are:
● Cloud adoption to increase
An organisation seeking to migrate its workloads to the cloud has to find a cloud service provider that meets its cryptographic requirements and complies with data localisation policy. However, not many cloud services have met these criteria. This partially explains India’s historical rate of cloud adoption, which sees larger organisations migrate slower and less often compared with smaller organisations like fintechs. This is starting to change, however.
● Remote key loading (RKL): a sought-after use case
Point of sale (POS) solutions, such as those used by merchants to process customer payments, are secured with encryption keys. However, these keys must be exchanged with centralised servers on a regular basis in order to protect against cyberattacks. As a result, remote key loading (RKL) is becoming popular among organisations that develop and deploy POS solutions. RKL is powered by general-purpose HSMs that encrypt and manage keys, meaning there is likely to be more demand for these solutions.
● Fintech market growth
India is already a major hub for payment processing, but its financial technology (fintech) market is growing fast as well. There are currently thousands of fintechs operating in India, with around 100 has reached a valuation of $1 billion without being listed on Indian stock exchanges. As cloud solutions continue to gain traction within India, it will be easier for fintech startups to get their products to market in shorter time frames, and for established fintechs to expand their service offerings.
● General-purpose encryption demand
Many payments and communications organisations in India are familiar with general-purpose cryptography, as it is often used to issue digital signatures to authenticate messages and data. One example is in the field of the internet of things (IoT). IoT solutions around the world are on the rise, and so are cyberattacks against IoT devices. In response, organisations are deploying digital signing operations to authenticate IoT devices and prevent network attacks. Another example is tokenisation, where sensitive data is substituted for randomised strings to make it unreadable in the event of a breach. This relates to a general trend toward better database security.
● Centralised cryptographic services groups for encryption and key management
By 2023, more organisations will move towards centralized cryptographic services groups that handle all encryption and key-management needs. Currently, they split these functions across business units, geographies, or applications. A centralised cryptographic services group will lead to improved efficiency and enhanced agility, facilitating the deployment of cryptography in more areas of the organisation.
● Complex infrastructure and compliant ways to secure data stored in the cloud
Post-pandemic, most companies are moving on-premise services into public, private, or hybrid clouds. This shift, however, poses new data security challenges and requires enhancement and protection of processes around services that moved to the cloud, supported by a complex infrastructure and compliance best practices. For example, document management may get changed and improved via encryption. Information stored in the databases will need to be encrypted instead of just being stored in cloud buckets. There is a need for an extra layer of protection to meet new challenges in addition to the mechanisms cloud services offer.
● Hardening of encryption to stay one step ahead of threats
Encryption is evolving. Globally, there are entities such as NIST (for general purposes) and PCI (for financial services), among others, that indicate the best way organisations need to handle information that contains sensitive data. These guidelines include a transaction, private document, invoice, or anything that involves money or information risk. With the growing information risk, the trend in encryption will be to harden as much as possible so that the hackers do not catch up with algorithms and find an easy way to decrypt what is encrypted.
● Encryption to become a must for all markets.
Today, it is not enough to pass PCI or local government audits. With all new services moving to the cloud, encryption should move from an option to a must-have capability. The guidance applies to not only tier-1 enterprises but also every single business involved in handling information, money, data, or whatever needs to be protected.