State of Security 2024: Network & Infrastructure – State of Security 2024 – Security

The rapid growth of cyber threats in the past 20 years has driven parallel growth in cyber defence solutions that has led to greater specialisation of tools and increased complexity in security environments.

As a result, older concepts such as network and infrastructure security have become buried under layers of specific capability.

But while SASE, XDR, and IAM all have their place, none of them individually solve the problem that the hardware that underpins them is also vulnerable to all manner of attacks.

One of the key challenges is that networks themselves are becoming more complicated, thanks to the fact that the older architectural model of an on-premises worker connecting to an on-premises data centre is becoming less and less common.

The need to secure users who are connecting from more locations to a set of distributed resources has been one of the key drivers of interest in SASE solutions, and specifically in the use of SD-WAN which is supplanting older methods of securing wide area connections such as VPNs.

Some organisations are alleviating themselves of the need for infrastructure security solutions by hosting their services in the cloud, which effectively makes infrastructure security the problem of the cloud service provider.

Neither solution eliminates the challenge of securing the infrastructure at the end points of the network, nor does it alleviate the risks posed by the people using those networks, with Stanford research finding that 88 percent of data breaches are caused by human error.

Network complexity is set to increase further as organisations adopt internet-of-things-based services – a market which Mordor Intelligence reports was worth US$1.17 trillion ($1.77 trillion) in 2024 – placing even greater pressure (and potential vulnerability) on the network.

Each of these devices is another potential entry point for criminals, which in turn is driving growth in tools such as IAM and endpoint security solutions, to ensure that weak access protocols and misconfigurations do not open the door to the outside world.

Finally, the need to lock down network access is becoming especially important for those industries that are incorporating traditional operational technology (OT) into their IT networks, such as utilities companies, and who are seeking the benefits of digitising infrastructure operations while avoiding the cyber security risks.

For those organisations that are choosing to continue operating their own infrastructure, the trend has been towards the adoption of concepts such as zero trust, defence in depth, and least privilege access.

These strategies are designed to not only defend infrastructure from external threats, but also to ensure that should defences be breached, successful attackers will be limited in their ability to inflict damage.