Cyberattacks are not new, but their frequency continues to increase as technology advances and as the world becomes increasingly digitized.
With the new year, it’s time to think about how you can strengthen your company’s resilience for the long haul. When planning, companies must, now more than ever, address the macro factors affecting the industry’s overall growth.
Companies must keep up with emerging cybersecurity trends to safeguard or fight against such attacks. In this article, we’ll discuss the top security megatrends for 2022 according to the Security Industry Association. We’ll also go over the premier solutions for rectifying known issues before they become a major problem for your company.
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1. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence (AI) first rose to the top of the Security Megatrends 2021 report. Despite the attempts to overthrow would-be successors of cybersecurity, supply chain, RMR models, and even long-term workforce development challenges, all attempts to dethrone AI ultimately failed. AI remains atop the Security Megatrends 2022 list.
In this industry, AI has always existed on a continuum, ranging from basic intelligence that you can find in the onboard chip of a small security camera to the level of intelligence that necessitates large server clusters and can analyze incredibly vast volumes of unstructured data.
Industry firms have welcomed the potential of AI through multiple avenues:
- Advanced audio analytics
- Complex facial recognition
- Advanced video surveillance scene processing that can recognize human behaviors
- Robotics and drones
- And more
This vast array of capabilities ensures that AI is here to stay and will continue to flourish.
2. Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is the second security megatrend for 2022. Notably, the industry’s concern is not just with physical cybersecurity but also with operational technology (OT) cybersecurity. However, it is a concern with cybersecurity in general.
Furthermore, while the AI megatrend may be the gleaming new object holding great potential, the cybersecurity megatrend is a potential threat. The more we advance AI and cyber technology, the more vulnerable we become.
As amazing as it can be, this trend also holds the nagging feeling that everything you have constructed might be exploited or even used against you if you make just one mistake.
3. Supply Chain Assurance
There are two sorts of supply chain assurance challenges that influence the sector’s future. The first is a logistical problem: obtaining source components, raw materials, and even finished goods.
You can find a disturbance in a variety of settings. For one, when the economy recovered quicker than anyone could have predicted, temporary shutdowns of some manufacturing units resulted in cascading shortages. For another example, personnel shortages complicated the situation, affecting the entire supply chain from manufacturing to shipping and distribution to the labor required to install products if such products are available.
The second supply chain assurance issue is essential, linked to cybersecurity’s second megatrend. The issue is the ability to place complete trust in any product or solution’s source code, firmware, system-on-chip, and other hackable parts. The problem now is to ensure that the code and subcomponents of any solution are transparent and traceable so that the end client can be certain that the device, software, or answer they receive is what they expected.
As a result, the supply chain assurance security megatrend of 2022 is a hybrid trend that combines logistics and cybersecurity. The industry is drawing closer attention to this direction than ever before.
4. Service Models and the Cloud
The megatrends of ‘move to service models’ and ‘cloud computing’ will be integrated in 2022. The fortunes of these two trends have frequently gotten linked, and delivering solutions in the cloud has been one means for many companies to transition to as-a-service or recurring revenue models.
Today, nearly every company in the industry is experimenting with this model. Thus, it is becoming rare to see a startup company launch without a subscription delivery model and some cloud component, whether a solution delivered completely via the cloud or a system that uses the cloud for certain storage or processing.
5. Workforce Development
The capacity to discover the talent that security industry executives and enterprises of all types require is one of the most significant pain areas. First, experts believed talent discovery was a broad-spectrum problem affecting manufacturing, software development, and sometimes sales. On the other hand, integrators were the biggest source of pain as they struggled to find qualified installers and technicians.
The failure of integrators to find the workforce they require has a snowball effect on the industry, limiting the ability to install products and complete customer job requests. This failure can compromise the security of client sites and create a bottleneck on potential sales for every company in the security technology business ecosystem, particularly manufacturers, solution developers, and distributors who rely on sales and project completion.
Although automation and AI are beginning to replace some manual labor, no one expects these technologies to immediately address the workforce shortage problem.
As a result, workforce development is a security megatrend in 2022, as enterprises struggle to find installers and labor shortages affect the entire supply chain.
6. Increased Interoperability
According to many systems integrators and manufacturers, excluding those maintained by major corporate, institutional, and government security customers, the number of individual security systems integrated into the sector is still shockingly low. However, as more systems become accessible and customers seek business operating insights and efficiency that you can discover only by combining data from numerous systems, that low rate of interconnectedness is improving.
The main trend in building and security environments has been toward open systems or standard protocols that allow communication between closed systems. With the rising use of wireless technologies in the built environment and most network-connected control systems, advancing interoperability becomes more attainable, driving interconnected security platforms and integrating security with other business systems.
7. Data Privacy
Data privacy is the seventh security megatrend, but underpinning it is a general increase in public concern about how their data is utilized and how they are followed, whether by security platforms, social media tools, or even government systems. Of course, the security industry is particularly relevant in this discussion because its methods frequently are designed to record data.
As a result, legislators and regulators are closely monitoring this megatrend. There are signs that data privacy will be more regulated by the government in the future, with several US states already exploring or having passed such legislation.
8. Security as PropTech
PropTech, in a broad sense, refers to any technology that affects how buildings are managed, used, or even bought, sold, or rented. Security solutions, particularly the building of access control systems, are ideally positioned as major data sources on building occupancy and utilization efficiency regarding how buildings are controlled and used. Because of security’s central role in the PropTech ecosystem, security solutions firms that embrace the trend receive renewed attention and higher values.
As buzzword-laden as it may be, this security megatrend is all about giving building owners, property managers, and tenants business insights. The objective of security’s mission changes from avoiding bad things to facilitating them—enabling wonderful experiences for employees and improved property management and allowing renters and building owners to make better use of their space.
9. Expanded Intelligence Monitoring
Door alarms, card swipes, and video recordings are no longer the only kind of data that most corporate security clients demand. Today’s top security officers are looking for intelligence from any public data sources that can help them improve their security responses. Those intelligence sources could include social media feeds and postings that mention their brand or retail locations. Still, they are also frequently official public data sources like the United States Department of State information feeds, weather data, international disaster and terrorism information, and more.
Expanding intelligence surveillance of surface-level online public data sources is commonplace. Still, organizations and service providers are increasingly researching the deep and dark web to spot emerging threats or investigate stolen data, making expanded intelligence monitoring a security megatrend in 2022.
10. Health and Sustainability
Without a doubt, the pandemic made a lasting impression on the security and safety business. While the initial response may have been to install security solutions that reduced the need for touch or could detect fevers, the conversation has grown significantly since those early days. Ultimately, the objective of the security sector is to ensure the safety and security of people and places, and maintaining people’s health is an important aspect of keeping them safe.
Notably, consumer interest in health controls extends beyond offices and business buildings to the smart home, making the residential green building movement a subset of the commercial green building movement.
Conclusion
The Security Megatrends are the most powerful factors in security, influencing CEOs’ business decisions and having far-reaching implications for firms across the industry. These trends play a key part in the insights and discussions that bring together a companies’ top entrepreneurs, luminaries, CEOs, and investors for high-quality information sharing, networking, and business analysis.
