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Attackers are so relentless in innovating new breach techniques that the cyber defenses deployed in 2022 have already weakened, with more serious attacks expected in 2024. Most cybersecurity leaders (71%) say their organizations have have experienced three or more security incidents alone.
Ransomware penetration attempts fell 30% last year as attackers turned to new attack strategies that are proving to be more lucrative and less detectable. As attackers outperform the current generation of security platforms, overall attack activity continues to grow despite growing budgets in an uncertain economic climate.
Scale enterprise Partners‘ (SVP) The Cybersecurity Perspectives 2023 report provides insight into the many challenges facing CISOs. These include increasingly sophisticated attacks, talent shortages, geopolitical tensions and overworked security teams. The report shows that CISOs are doubling down on network, IAM and cloud security to better protect against identity-based attacks.
CISOs fight identity theft
The growing reliance of organizations on multiple cloud services creates an attractive target for attackers, who use pretext and social engineering to steal privileged access data. SVP’s survey found that 50% of security leaders say their cloud services accounts have been attacked in the past year. That corresponds to Crowd Strikes 2023 Global Threat report.
CrowdStrike found that the exploitation of cloud infrastructure gaps – typically the stealing of credentials, identities and data – will increase 95% by 2022, with the number of cases involving “cloud-aware” threat actors tripling year over year. Attackers try to modify authentication processes to attack identities.
“A particularly popular tactic has been the misuse of compromised credentials obtained from information thieves or purchased from the criminal underworld, reflecting a growing interest in attacking identities that we also saw last year: our 2022 report found that 80% of cyber-attacks used identity-based techniques,” writes CrowdStrike co-founder and CEO George Kurtz.
Identities are under siege and CISOs are prioritizing their spending in response. Getting identity and access management (IAM) under control is a challenging problem, especially when an organization relies on multiple cloud services, said Ariel Tseitlin, partner at SVP, in a recent interview with VentureBeat. The number of companies compromised by phishing attacks that stole employee credentials through cloud services increased by 58%.
“Identity is where security is going…because there’s so much more rich data out there,” Tseitlin told VentureBeat. IAM rose from eighth to second in this year’s investment priority ranking, reflecting rising market concerns about identity security in multicloud tech stacks. Network security and cloud infrastructure security carry over from last year’s survey and join IAM as the top three enterprise cybersecurity spending priorities in 2023. (Leading IAM providers include AWS Identity and access managementcrowd strike, Delinea, Ericom, ForgeRock, Google Cloud IdentityIBM Cloud Identity, Microsoft Azure Active GuidePalo Alto Networks and Zscaler.)
Business cybersecurity budgets increase by 20% on average
Large enterprises see their security budgets increase by an average of 20%, while medium-sized enterprises only increase by an average of 5%. The SVP survey of security leaders also found that security budgets for emerging technologies are up 18% this year, down 27% from 2022. That’s consistent with what many other surveys are seeing, including from Ivanti State of Security Preparedness 2023 Reportwhich found that 71% of CISOs and security professionals predict their budgets will increase by an average of 11% this year, well above expected inflation.
Data, application, cloud and endpoint security will receive an average of 10% of companies’ total cybersecurity budgets this year. Compared to last year, the budgets for endpoint security, identity management and security awareness training see the largest increases.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) security and software supply chain security were included for the first time in this year’s survey, accounting for 6% and 5% of budgets, respectively.
A clear sign that boards of directors view cybersecurity spending as an investment that helps manage risk is the increase in the security budget per employee, rising to $3,653 this year, up 20% from $3,033 per employee last year .
![Total safety budget 2023](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/top3-2.png?w=800&is-pending-load=1#038;resize=886%2C466&strip=all)
Cybersecurity’s resilient budgets reflected in fast-growing revenue forecasts
Organizations are hesitant to cut cybersecurity budgets for fear of falling too far behind as attackers use new technologies, including AI/ML, to launch attacks while weaponizing old vulnerabilities. SVP notes that CISOs are preparing to take greater control of their spending decisions and longer decision-making deadlinesHowever.
For the past three years, cybersecurity budgets have been among the most resilient among organizations of all sizes. The aggregated effects of continued spending and what Gartner is hearing from its enterprise customers about planned purchases led the analytics firm to predict that end-user spending in the information security and risk management market will grow to $188.1 billion this year and $188.1 billion by 2027. will reach 288.5 billion. That is a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.0% from 2022 to 2027.
from Gartner last predictions [client access required]by selected enterprise information security and risk management markets include the following, further reflecting how resilient budgeting is driving the market’s growth:
- Application security is expected to grow from $5.7 billion in revenue this year to $9.6 billion in 2027, achieving a CAGR of 13.6%.
- Cloud security is expected to grow from $5.6 billion in revenue this year to $12.8 billion in 2023, achieving a CAGR of 22.8%.
- Data security is expected to grow from $3.6 billion in 2023 to $6.1 billion in 2027, achieving a CAGR of 13.6%.
- Identity access management is expected to grow from $16.1 billion in 2023 to $24.8 billion in 2027, achieving a CAGR of 11.4%.
Companies look to AI/ML to close the talent gap
Security leaders who responded to PVC’s survey said finding and hiring cloud security experts is the most challenging role to fill. More than half of organizations (57%) said the biggest obstacle to achieving their desired security position was insufficient security staff, an increase of 42% from last year. Security teams struggle with too many alerts, too many false positives and too many tools, among other things.
![Cloud security roles difficult to fill](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/top3-3.png?w=800&is-pending-load=1#038;resize=847%2C365&strip=all)
AI/ML tools help security leaders close the talent gap and scale their understaffed teams. Four out of five security leaders (79%) believe AI/ML will be “important” or “extremely important” in improving their security posture by 2024. More than 60% of cybersecurity leaders trust cybersecurity tools with AI/ML-based capabilities to further address talent shortages. And 62% of security leaders use AI/ML-based tools to automate security processes.
Meanwhile, CISOs tell VentureBeat they are testing generative AI-based platforms with ChatGPT capabilities to reduce SecOps workload. Ten use cases emerge from the initial pilots that show the potential to lighten the workload of SecOp teams.
![Closing the Security Talent Gap](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/top3-4.png?w=568&is-pending-load=1#038;resize=568%2C259&strip=all)
Whoever owns a company’s identity owns the company
SVP’s research shows how critical it is for any organization to get IAM under control and have a solid strategy in place to fortify each vulnerable threat surface. Identities are the most vulnerable security perimeter there is.
Attackers know there are gaps in cloud configurations, and by stealing privileged access credentials, they can essentially take control of an entire company before anyone realizes it. That’s why IAM is critical to getting it right and experiencing rapid growth. CISOs and CIOs continue to work together to close cloud configuration gaps and strengthen network security.
And it all has to start with identities – the primary target of attackers these days.