Research Report

2021: The Year of Complexity

Wow. What a year!

We began last January with the realization that we have met a new and far more difficult class of cyber threat with the SolarWinds attack followed by the Colonial Pipeline attack in May. Both point to a fully wired world where physical and digital are colliding at unprecedented speeds.

If we had to choose a theme for 2021, it would be complexity. The convergence of internet-enabled computing devices across multiple cloud entities and configurations, the rapid acceleration in the growth of “smart” devices and their interconnectivity, the push toward Continuous Introduction/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) for more agile and shorter innovation development cycles craved by business units and customers have all combined to create a perfect storm.

Moving into 2022, what we do and how we do it, in both cybersecurity marketing and in cybersecurity defense, will be directional signals for both progress and regress in the years to come. The devil is in the details and there are many moving parts to these puzzles, but putting stakes in the ground for both how we defend (Zero Trust) and how we move markets (alternate messaging on alternate media channels), is a good place to start.