Cybersecurity Trends To Monitor In 2020

Businesses are digitizing at a rapid pace, adding a variety of digital communication and collaboration solutions into their environments. Voice, video, mobility, and workforce productivity apps are all making their way into the enterprise arena, and changing the way companies operate. But this brings new challenges for cybersecurity.

While it’s great to see digital transformation picking up steam, it’s becoming problematic from a cybersecurity perspective. The enterprise threat surface is constantly expanding, and these threats are increasing in both sophistication and power. According to Accenture, 68 percent of business leaders feel their cybersecurity risks are increasing.

Unfortunately, the contact center remains one of the most vulnerable parts of the enterprise, as it’s responsible for an enormous volume of inbound and outbound communication. As such, contact center managers need to stay up to speed with the latest cybersecurity threats and trends in order to prevent attacks from penetrating and cascading throughout the organization.

Here’s a look at some of the key cybersecurity trends that contact center managers should be paying attention to throughout 2020:

BYOD: A Growing Cybersecurity Threat

The bring your own device (BYOD) trend has become commonplace in the enterprise arena, with most companies now allowing users to communicate using their mobile devices for work purposes.

BYOD is very convenient, and if executed properly it can help create an employee-centric environment. In terms of cybersecurity, though, it can be a big risk. According to Kaspersky, about half of all organizations experienced a malware infection on an employee-owned device in 2019. The same was true for company-owned devices.

All businesses using BYOD should consider embracing unified communications a service (UCaaS) in order to centralize and secure communications across all endpoints. This way, businesses can prevent data from living in third party apps and databases, which are often beyond the scope of the internal IT team.

Ransomware: Still In The Wild

While ransomware is no longer a new trend, it’s still a very popular and highly effective tool for cybercriminals—and experts predict that we’ll continue to see ransomware attacks increase in 2020.

Ransomware is an especially dangerous threat to a contact center, where agents often need to quickly exchange documents with customers over email—increasing the risk of accidentally opening a file with ransomware and infecting the organization.

The Worsening Cybersecurity Shortage

Organizations across all vertical markets are dealing with a worsening cybersecurity shortage, making it harder to stay on top of evolving threats. In the U.S., the cybersecurity workforce gap is roughly 500,000. To close this gap, the workforce needs to grow by 62 percent. Globally, it should be noted, the shortage is hovering around 4 million—an enormous volume, when considering the current state of the cybersecurity landscape.

This trend is good news for managed service providers, however, that sell cybersecurity services and products. Companies that cannot protect their own networks using in-house resources are strongly advised to outsource to MSPs—a trend that will certainly continue throughout 2020 and beyond.