Publisher’s Spotlight: AT&T Cybersecurity: Edge Ecosystem

Each year, the cybersecurity industry anticipates a handful of landmark research that informs the market regarding benchmarking best practices, understanding emerging trends, and innovation breakthroughs. The annual AT&T Cybersecurity Insights(TM) Report is one of those seminal pieces of research that helps the industry understand what is happening and why.

The report is vendor-neutral, forward-looking, and actionable. 2023 is the twelfth edition of AT&T Cybersecurity’s ground-breaking research. The global quantitative field survey combined with qualitative analysis provides insight into critical cybersecurity issues and emerging technologies to help executives, security professionals, and business leaders understand the current threat landscape and develop strategies for building a more resilient cybersecurity approach.

The 2023 AT&T Cybersecurity Insights Report: Edge Ecosystem focuses on connecting and securing the entire edge computing ecosystem. For research purposes, we defined edge computing as:

• A distributed model of management, intelligence, and networks.
• Applications, workloads, and hosting closer to the users and assets generating or consuming the data, which can be on-premises and in the cloud.
• Software-defined.

Edge computing is underpinned by networks with lower latency and higher bandwidth, ephemeral applets communicating machine-to-machine, and a digital-first experience driven by data.

Unexpected priorities help shape the future of securing edge computing.

The findings reveal a change in investing. Proactive investment in edge use cases is reported as businesses see positive implementation outcomes and expect to continue investing in use cases. More than half of respondents (56%) say partial implementation of edge use cases – while still considered new technology, nearly everyone is on an edge journey.

Edge computing is shifting how organizations budget, plan, and prioritize digital-first initiatives. Security is considered much earlier in the development cycle and consumes 22% of the overall project budget. Notably, there’s a shift from networking grabbing the bulk of the budget. The research found that budgeting is equally distributed among strategy, planning, networking, and security. This indicates that security is integral to deploying edge use cases, not just an afterthought.

A shift in threat vectors comes with edge computing.

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are now the top concern for most organizations across various industries when examining the aggregated data versus by industry. Ransomware dropped to last place out of the eight attack types reviewed. While ransomware ranks low as an attack type, ransomware remains a concern.

The edge computing journey is most successful with collaboration.

Respondents leverage resources such as third-party experts, advisors, and partners to ensure long-term success. The research found that 52% work with in-house resources plus a systems integration partner for edge projects, and 63% work with in-house resources alongside a consultant.

We simplify securing valuable business assets by providing broad cybersecurity experience and award-winning services for network security, extended detection and response, and endpoints. From traditional computing to edge computing, we’re focused on business innovation. We help make complexity easy to understand and navigate.

By providing affordable, strategic services, AT&T Cybersecurity clients rely on us as trusted advisors. Our cybersecurity consulting is product neutral, so you get unbiased answers for your business. Our managed security services, threat awareness, and ground-breaking research are dedicated to helping keep you protected today and prepared for tomorrow.

For more information on AT&T Cybersecurity, please visit https://cybersecurity.att.com/. To download a complimentary copy of the “2023 AT&T Cybersecurity Insights Report: Edge Ecosystem,” please click here.

About the Publisher

Gary Miliefsky, Publisher & Author.  Gary Miliefsky is an internationally recognized cybersecurity expert, bestselling author and keynote speaker. He is a Founding Member of the US Department of Homeland Security, served on the National Information Security Group and served on the OVAL advisory board of MITRE responsible for the CVE Program. He founded and is the Publisher of Cyber Defense Magazine since 2012. Visit Gary online at: https://www.cyberdefensemagazine.com/