What is adaptive security?

[tarekma7]

Just as surely as night follows day, a new buzzword enters the scene. This time it’s ‘adaptive cybersecurity.’ You can file this one under things that we’ve always done (or at least should have done) that someone’s now invented a new word for.

Adaptive cybersecurity is exactly what you think it is: an approach to security threats that acknowledges that because threats are evolving and changing, you, as an organization, need to be positioned to be able to identify, monitor, and minimize risks as and when they occur.

An article in Forbes argued that 2021 is the year of adaptive cybersecurity. Make of that what you will, but the writer cites a range of reports that have been illustrated that the concept has staying power. PWC research, for example, indicates that “55% [of research participants] are seeing their cybersecurity budgets increase in 2021 over 2020, with more automated, adaptive cybersecurity being the goal for this year.”

There are a couple of reasons why the concept is starting to gain traction in the tech press and analyst reports.

Artificial intelligence

There are two reasons why artificial intelligence is driving discussion about adaptive cybersecurity. On the one hand it enables in-depth and large-scale security monitoring, allowing security teams to identify anomalies and suspicious activity in a way that would have previously been impossible. On the other, it is also driving changes in threats, allowing cybercriminals to do something similar: exploit data at scale to identify vulnerabilities to launch attacks with greater ‘intelligence’.

Distributed software infrastructure

The evolution of software infrastructure from monolith to microservices demands different things from security teams. While it undoubtedly presents some distinct security benefits, it also poses a number of challenges. In short, it demands a holistic perspective on your security posture; it forces engineers and analysts to think about how different parts of a system interrelate. This makes adaptive cybersecurity more important because your system itself is more dynamic — you need to be able to adapt your security as your system evolves and changes.

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