Companies have been racing to mature their technologies and pursue digital transformations in the last few years, as a way to gain or maintain competitive advantage and resilience. This has led to an emerging area of focus: cyber asset management. Organizations are now taking inventory of their IT infrastructure and prioritizing more agile cyber asset management processes. What trends will shape the business landscape in this upcoming year and how can leaders prepare?

Cloud migrations will increase: Companies already in the cloud will continue to evolve and rationalize their multi-cloud strategies for any number of reasons that may include pricing, availability, license bundling, and other factors. Because of this, we will see more cloud-first enterprises moving resources from one cloud to another. So, while such enterprises may have a steady percentage of their assets in the cloud over time, those assets will be spread across a more diverse third-party landscape of multiple cloud providers. The cyber asset management mandate in this scenario will be to facilitate smooth and secure operations over this range of multiple cloud vendors – so the enterprise can reduce risk exposure from having a single cloud vendor, without introducing new risks from misaligned multi-cloud assets.

On-prem is not going away anytime soon: The fact is that enterprises have invested so heavily in the cloud in recent years that the strategies have not always kept up with the investments. That means on-prem systems may still be the best place to keep certain data until a solid framework for handling such data securely and efficiently in the cloud takes shape. Furthermore, as organizations modernize their environments and implement more coherent, long-term strategies, they will likely see cases where on-prem is still the best choice for some applications and data. This is especially true for highly sensitive or highly regulated data sets, or situations where keeping the apps and data on-prem better supports integration, performance, reliability, and security. Whether the strategy requires data to be temporarily or permanently kept away from the cloud, organizations will increasingly realize the value of retaining a certain degree of on-prem capacity and the cyber assets. 

Cyber asset management will define the maturity agenda for Web3 enterprise readiness: Blockchain and related technologies leveraging web decentralization have fueled excitement for years and, more recently, hopes for enterprise applications of decentralized systems. That’s uncovering the true learning curve that remains for decentralized Web3 applications or services built on peer-to-peer networks. The hype honeymoon is over and now it’s time for a reality check on asset visibility and control before enterprises will take Web3 seriously. Before enterprises can enjoy the potential cost and scalability benefits of decentralized architectures, the maturity agenda needs to be charted. Enterprise readiness won’t come before major questions are answered around the tooling, instrumentation, and security required to manage valuable cyber assets across multi-cloud systems that may include Web3 components.

Growth of Industry 4.0 will drive more alignment of IT and OT assets: Digital transformations overall have increased as a response for adapting to COVID-19 business impacts, and this is true for Industry 4.0 transformations as well. Resilience equals agility. And given the goals for this in production and supply chain settings, IT and OT assets are increasingly facing the need to be better coordinated. Cyber asset management therefore must encompass the entire spectrum of OT and IT assets – from IT teams’ hardware, networking and connectivity, to OT-related machine data and machine software. The more complete picture organizations can get across this spectrum of assets, including their characteristics, behaviors, and interdependencies, the better orchestration and fewer surprises companies will have. 

Faster adoption of edge and 5G networks will increase emphasis on asset capacity and costs: The proliferation of both edge computing and 5G networks holds tremendous potential. Edge computing happens at or near the source of data, allowing for broader compute power and lower latency spread across a company’s cyber assets. By some estimates, 75% of enterprise data is expected to be created and processed at the edge by 2025. At the same time, 5G networks can further enhance bandwidth and reduce latency. But challenges to cyber asset management can arise trying to connect the processes and data from such newer systems with older systems. Organizations will need to address volumes and velocity of data to align these disparate systems in which centralized cloud systems may not be ready to handle the flood of information coming from assets on the edge, accelerated by 5G.

Enhanced biometrics will require enhanced asset management to stay frictionless in zero-trust authentication: As procedures for data security and access management strengthen and evolve, cyber asset management to support zero-trust authentication will become an increasingly critical focus. These are environments with rigorous authentication, such as behavioral biometrics and liveness detection, that involve a much more complex set of cyber assets and policies. Authentication is about striking the right balance of security with seamlessness: Too many hurdles to authentication and the systems become too cumbersome for authorized users; too few safeguards and the frictionless experience is also fraught with cyber risk. Cyber asset management will increasingly be at the center of trying to strike this balance by supporting strong authentication with maximum efficiency and minimal latency.