The COVID-19 pandemic exposed new weaknesses in enterprise cybersecurity preparedness.

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To call 2020 a rough year for enterprise cybersecurity teams would be something of an understatement.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the newly distributed workforce that it engendered upended security strategies and forced a rethink of approaches to securing remote workers and supply chains at many companies.

Security teams that had implemented controls for managing remote workers suddenly had to contend with a magnitudes-fold increase in the number of users they had to support this way. With more users accessing enterprise systems and data from their homes, attack surfaces increased dramatically. Enterprise security teams found themselves scrambling to implement new controls to manage threats due to their increased risk exposure.

Security operations teams found themselves scrambling to address issues around communications and challenges related to breach investigations and visibility into endpoint systems. Organizations that had adopted a zero-trust approach to security suddenly found reason to accelerate their plans.

Already overburdened security operations teams had to find ways to remain effective in a new threat environment, even as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and zero-trust initiatives attracted greater enterprise interest and investments.

Here, according to a half-dozen security experts, are the six main takeaways from 2020 for cybersecurity practitioners.

About the Author(s)

Jai Vijayan, Contributing Writer

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year career at Computerworld, Jai also covered a variety of other technology topics, including big data, Hadoop, Internet of Things, e-voting, and data analytics. Prior to Computerworld, Jai covered technology issues for The Economic Times in Bangalore, India. Jai has a Master's degree in Statistics and lives in Naperville, Ill.

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