According to Gartner, security and risk management leaders must address eight top trends to enable rapid reinvention in their organization, as COVID-19 accelerates digital business transformation and challenges traditional cybersecurity practices:

1. Cybersecurity Mesh: a modern approach that deploys controls where they are most needed. Rather than every security tool running in a silo, this enables tools to interoperate by providing foundational security services and centralized policy management and orchestration. With increased remote work, this allows security controls to distributed assets.

• Identity-First Security: due to technical and cultural shifts, coupled with a now majority remote workforce during COVID-19, identity-first security puts identity at the center of security design and demands a major shift from traditional LAN edge design thinking.

• Security Support for Remote Work: 64% of employees are now able to work from home. This requires security tools suitable for the modern remote workspace. For example, endpoint protection services will need to move to cloud delivered services.

• Cyber-Savvy Board of Directors: by 2025, 40% of boards of directors will have a dedicated cybersecurity committee overseen by a qualified board member, up from less than 10% today.

• Security Vendor Consolidation: 78% of CISOs have 16 or more tools in their cybersecurity vendor portfolio; 12% have 46 or more. These large numbers increase complexity, integration costs and staffing requirements. In a recent Gartner survey, 80% of IT organizations said they plan to consolidate vendors over the next three years.

• Privacy-Enhancing Computation: these techniques protect data while it’s being used to enable secure data processing, sharing, cross-border transfers and analytics, even in untrusted environments or multiparty data analytics use cases.

• Breach and Attack Simulation: these tools are emerging to provide continuous defensive posture assessments, challenging the limited visibility provided by annual point assessments like penetration testing.

• Managing Machine Identities: aims to establish and manage trust in the identity of a machine interacting with other entities, such as devices or applications. Increased numbers of nonhuman entities in organizations, mean managing machine identities has become vital.

Fuente:  Gartner          Date: March 23-2021

Effects on Costa Rica exports

To be aligned with these trends, companies around the globe need to incorporate reliable providers of cybersecurity services. According to a PROCOMER research, 23% of ICT companies related to 4.0 technologies in Costa Rica, are specialized in cybersecurity. This important offer led in 2020 to the establishment of Cybersec Costa Rica, the first cybersecurity hub in Central America, which is formed by private companies, the academy, business associations and government institutions. In the country, more than 2000 people work in cybersecurity services, such as incidents response, security platform management and vulnerability management.

USA is the main destination for Costa Rican 4.0 technologies related exports. The similar time zone with USA, the highly skilled Costa Rican workforce (#1 in ICT skills in Latin America, Network Readiness Index 2020) and also english proficient (#2 in Latin America, EF English Proficiency Index 2020) are some of the reasons that explain why important USA companies have preferred Costa Rican based companies for their cybersecurity services. For example, IBM established its advanced cybersecurity center in Costa Rica, to support more than 1100 clients globally with 24x7x365 operations. This kind of investments have allowed the development of an important cybersecurity ecosystem in the country.

If you are interested in knowing more about Costa Rican offer in cybersecurity services, please let us know at newyork@procomer.com