Keeping Up in a Dynamic World: The Roadblocks
Every year since 2007, Apple has released a new iPhone model (and iOS upgrade) that leverages faster and, at times, newer technology. Most users upgrade their phones every other year, some do so annually, and the rest hold onto the older models for as long as their patience allows.
Hardware is the vessel of information technology, but it can also be its biggest obstacle. This is especially true in the cybersecurity space, which operates in a dynamic landscape. In 2017 alone, there were over 120 million new pieces of malware.1 That’s 120 million+ new pieces of malware that networks needed to protect against.
At that rate of threat generation, how can we expect yesterday’s hardware to protect our networks today and tomorrow? Why are we more willing to upgrade our phones every other year (or every year), but not our cybersecurity?
The Roadblocks
It’s relatively easy to get stuck in a cycle of technology obsolescence. This is in part due to risk (i.e. downtime and impact) and budgets. Upgrading your phone is a low risk transaction with little downtime that impacts an individual, while upgrading a cybersecurity solution has the potential risk of a lengthier downtime that may interrupt business operations and impact a company and its clientele. After all, cybersecurity configurations and network compatibility are more process-intensive than restoring a new iPhone from a recent backup.
IT budgets are also limited and often prevent network refreshes from moving forward. One issue is that the cost of cybersecurity involves more than just hardware. Furthermore, trying to quantify the ROI of cybersecurity is an issue in and of itself.
Risk and budget considered, there are security features and strategies companies can employ to circumvent the hardware game. These are not mutually exclusive and each can play a key role in strengthening your security posture against future threats.
In this blog series, we’ll take a deep dive into how to keep your cybersecurity relevant and up-to-date.
1 https://www.av-test.org/en/statistics/malware/