Cyber Defense eMagazine January 2021 Edition

Peer-To-Peer Cybersecurity Insights For 2021
Based on real practitioners’ experiences
By Stuart Berman, IT Central Station Super User
December is typically a month when people who work in the IT field offer predictions for the coming year.
2020 has been a highly atypical year, however, so it’s a bit daunting to think about what’s coming over
the horizon. Yet, my company is in a unique position to engage in prognostication. We source user data
directly from users in the trenches. In a year when travel has not been possible, IT professionals could
not rely on the traditional get-togethers and in-person discussions to get advice and feedback from other
industry experts. Online review sites such as our have boomed as a result. With that in mind, here are
five predictions for cybersecurity, based on what are learning from real practitioners.
Countermeasures and security operations catch up with containerization and microservices—
While neither containerization nor microservices are new, they have reached a level of adoption that calls
for a revised approach to cloud security. I say revised, versus new, because it’s easy to get pulled into
“It’s all different, trash everything you’re doing” discussions. These are traps to avoid, as are the seductive
but in my view false ideas like “Firewalls are dead in the cloud. You just need good code.” No, principles
like Defense in Depth don’t go away just because you’re running virtualized services in the cloud. Rather,
securing containers and microservices calls for new, virtualized versions of familiar technologies like
firewalls.
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