By Nick Schneider, CEO and President of Arctic Wolf
As a CEO, I’ve learned that there’s never a bad time to reflect, either on my own leadership or the actions my company has taken over the past year. But as 2024 gets underway, I’ve been reflecting on the cybersecurity market as a whole — and I’m convinced we’re at the crossroads of a generational divide in approaches to security. Here’s why.
One of the defining cybersecurity themes of 2023 was the resurgence of ransomware, which included threat actors treating the attack type like an entrepreneur would treat their product. In just the first half of the year, we saw a 46% increase in ransomware incidents compared to the second half of 2022, showcasing just how rampant this threat vector has become.
On top of this, we’ve seen evidence that the bad actors launching those attacks were collaborating with one another in multiple forms. Following the rise of ransomware, the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence, and the race between cybersecurity companies and their adversaries to use the technology to enhance threat detection systems or cyber-attack techniques has been on everyone’s mind and certainly at the forefront of mine.
What both of these themes have in common, though, is that organizations responding to them require powerful, scalable systems that can successfully ingest vast amounts of security data without also spitting back hundreds or even thousands of alerts that have to be analyzed by hand — creating hours upon hours of busywork and stress for employees in an industry that both moves at the speed of a mouse click and has a global workforce shortage. What customers need are cybersecurity tools that cut through the noise of near-constant ransomware attacks and can operate with the speed and precision of AI.
As threat actors continue to expand their use of ransomware and AI-based attacks, vendors selling out-of-the-box point-to-point solutions that only defend one aspect of an organization’s environment and aren’t interoperable with other tools simply will not be able to keep up with the evolving threat landscape. There’s three other huge problems that security vendors will have to solve to win the market in 2024: alleviating the talent crisis, alert fatigue, and complexity within overlayered security systems.
Mid-size organizations, for example, often don’t have the bandwidth internally to manage 30+ security tools, so they’re looking to spend their money with providers that can unify the security solutions for them — i.e., those who take an operational approach to security. This tide is similar to the rise of next-generation End Point Protection vendors back in 2019 taking down legacy players.
One area in which security vendors have the opportunity to differentiate themselves for these mid-market customers is in their usage of AI, and more importantly, how well they can use AI to reduce alert fatigue and complexity within their customer’s systems.
For example, AI has the potential to allow security practitioners to focus on only the highest severity of threats, handling much of the busywork of threat detection that would otherwise occupy their time. Sixty-one percent of security leaders believe that AI will eventually outperform humans in detecting threats, according to an Arctic Wolf Survey, but only 22% are dedicating the majority of their cybersecurity budget to AI-powered solutions. So there’s currently a significant gap between the belief in and actual implementation of AI, but as the technology become cheaper, easier to use and better understood, I expect vendors to make AI a much larger part of their solutions portfolio.
Ultimately, no matter the approach a company takes to defending themselves, 2023 has revealed that most all industries understand security is not optional. In our cloud-based world, small mistakes can leave the door wide open for threat actors, and businesses still need to allocate spending for security training and other pieces of their security posture. As 2024 approaches, the most successful security organizations will be those who capitalize on these needs as efficiently as possible for their customers.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
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