Trends Impacting India's Cybersecurity Sector in 2022

Cyberattacks in India have increased during the pandemic, and this trend appears to be continuing, as the new distributed workforce provides more opportunities for criminals to exploit. The cyber security market in India is expected to grow to USD 3.05 billion by 2022 driven by investments by organizations to safeguard against cyber threats. 

Moving into 2022, cyber criminals will almost certainly continue to take advantage of any human or technical flaws, as well as the hybrid work era's more complicated IT requirements. Here we take look at some of the trends that will impact India’s cybersecurity sector in the year ahead.

Cyber criminals will take advantage of weaknesses brought forth by the pandemic

Throughout the pandemic, organizations around the world have become even more reliant on increasingly capable technological approaches to bolster business resilience. However, despite these efforts, threat actors have been able to exploit both human and technical weaknesses in more complex and dispersed networks resulting in considerable economic and productivity damages. 

Looking ahead to 2022, threat actors will continue to exploit weaknesses that organizations struggle to correct due to ever-increasing complexity, allowing them to further their own interests. In other words, expect 2022 to look at lot like 2021 in terms of notable and sensational exploits.

Cyber threats, such as ransomware, will continue to increase

The IT world went into chaos when employees started working from home overnight because they had to solve for massive increases in scale and performance with little warning, and we all know that attackers love chaos. Fast forward nearly 2 years and now a large portion of those work-from-home employees are about to come back into the office — at least part time — so IT security teams are going to learn quickly where they have gaps securing the corporate network from the office. More network chaos always means more successful cyberattacks.

Enhanced endpoint security bolstered by automation

Newly remote workforces are now the easy targets for adversaries, so classic antivirus solutions will be completely displaced by concepts of Extended Detection and Response (XDR) and Endpoint detection and response (EDR) for protection of endpoints from advanced and sophisticated threats. Traditional security analytics solutions like security information and event management (SIEM) will evolve towards tools leveraging concepts of AI and ML for security automation and orchestration. 

Work from anywhere model embedded with Security framework will persist

As many companies have adopted work-from-home policies in response to the pandemic, cybersecurity has become a major issue. While every organization's objective is to follow the technology trends of anywhere, anytime connection, it also forces them to consider an unprecedented growth in the attack surface throughout the network.

Organizations will strategically invest more on technologies like SASE, Cloud access security broker (CASB), secure web gateway (SWG) to name a few. These solutions and architecture combine networking and security to give consumers direct, secure access to cloud-based apps while also protecting users, programs, and infrastructure regardless of location.

Securing the Cloud Workload

With a multifold increase in cloud-based application workload and a shift toward hybrid cloud strategies, organizations are reaping the benefits of agility and scale while opening up new avenues for adversaries to exploit vulnerabilities and target the larger threat landscape.

Cloud workloads for microservices driven applications built on virtualized modules like containers will require specific solutions to protect from cyber threats. This will proliferate the technologies like Cloud Workload Protection and Cloud Security Posture Management with the objective to gain visibility and provide threat protection. DevSecOps will integrate and perform infrastructure and application security in the CI/CD pipeline and these solutions will also provide complete protections during runtime environment.

Interest in a Zero-trust security model

As one of the paramount security frameworks, adoption of zero-trust architecture by Indian enterprises will increase. By implementing strategies such as Zero trust network access (ZTNA), Micro-Segmentation and IoT security, organizations will embrace various process and technologies in support of zero trust approach to secure user to user, machine to machine, application to application or user to applications communication.

Infrastructure security will be a major “thing” for organizations in both the enterprise and service provider spaces

Due to both the increase in cyberattacks and the realization (finally) by governments that critical infrastructure — and what enterprises deem “critical” to their businesses — is seriously at risk, we are going to see a much larger emphasis on infrastructure security. While India recently jumped 37 places to tenth position in the Global Cybersecurity Index 2020, and the government is nearing completion of a National Cybersecurity Strategy, only time will tell whether organizations can keep up with today's rapidly changing threat landscape.