In the midst of celebrating 25 years of Trend Micro in Latin America, Ignacio Triana, the Technology leader for the MCA region, shared his vision on security technology trends and objectives of his firm.
“It is probably very ambitious, but by 2026, we want to double our revenue”, says Ignacio Triana, leader of MCA Trend Micro Technology, when talking about the operation in Colombia. And although it may sound very optimistic, it has reasons to do so, since security is more necessary than ever.
Even more so if we consider that, by the fourth quarter of 2021, there were more than 900 attacks per company across the planet. Y in Latin America these attacks grew by 38 percent, compared to 2020, using techniques ranging from ransomware to denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
But when analyzing these figures we must take into account the context and the Digital Transformation that industries suffered in the midst of the pandemic, which went from traditional work models to teleworking that, in countries like Colombia, reached 209.000 teleworkers, in 2020.
This change created challenges for IT departments and opportunities for cybercriminals. "For us Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have always been highly secure endpoints, but in the pandemic attackers discovered there was a way to exploit them. and they made the most of it"says Triana.
trusting in the cloud
Although the Digital Transformation brought about by Covid-19 meant positive aspects in the development of digital channels, particularly electronic commerce, it also generated cultural changes in organizations that occurred from one moment to the next. And every systems department knows that end users are the biggest risks in all strategiess of cybersecurity.
Thus, in the scenario that the pandemic left us, cloud computing presented itself as both a victim and a savior in risk management. Victim because together with teleworking it meant an expansion in the attack surface of criminals, and savior because it became an invaluable tool for technology administrators.
It is not for nothing that cloud computing has been one of the great protagonists of the computer revolution of the last decade and it was it that allowed the decentralization of operations, facilitating the migration to teleworking. But this same migration meant facing new challenges in user authentication and data security.
In this regard, Triana recalls that The cloud, although it brought operational efficiencies, also meant a loss in the visibility of the operations of many companies.. These challenges also demanded the deployment of security solutions optimized to work in hybrid environments. And how to do it? … ironically, using the same cloud.
Because cloud-based security solutions allow for automatic software updating remotely. At the same time, being managed online makes it easier to comply with local and international regulations. In the same way, like any cloud-based solution, it can be scaled / grown more easily. “Our goal is to bring our customers to the cloud. Because that's definitely the future." Triana adds.
Times of resilience...
Although the cloud is awarded the expansion of the vulnerable surface of some companiesIt is also true that the usual suspects still prevail. “Statistics say that the most used attack vector for software is email” adds the manager.
This without counting on innumerable fronts of attack that go from social networks to USB sticks armed with new viruses. Not for nothing, every day they are detected more than 560 thousand malware signatures.
This has led to a paradigm shift in companies that have gone, over the years, from thinking about infinite invulnerability of their systems to considering what would happen when they were attacked. In this way, resilience enters the scene.
Defined by PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) analysts as the ability of an organization to anticipate and react to change, not only to survive, but to evolve. This recovery capacity is compared to the immune system of companies.
Triana adds that this trend seeks to raise awareness among companies "That they can be attacked, but there are ways to react much faster so that their services are not impacted".
In other words, cybersecurity is a moving target that moves according to new trends in technology (5G networks, Internet of Things, etc.), while new vulnerabilities are discovered. Because security, ultimately, is a philosophy, an ultimate goal that is sought based on strategies where its protagonists are imperfect beings: the users.
