Agiliance Releases Top Five IT Security Predictions for 2012

Agiliance, a provider of security and operational risk management solutions for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) programs, announced its top five Information Technology (IT) security predictions for 2012.

According to Agiliance, organizations will recognize that risk is security's new compliance. A risk-based approach and holistic view of the organization's IT infrastructure will be driven by further consumerization of IT and challenges related to social media as an instrument in cyber warfare.

Agiliance suggests that stricter enforcement and new legislation focused on data protection, threat information sharing, and incident disclosure, as well as the emerging need to assess cloud service providers' ability to enforce security policies and maintain an adequate compliance posture will also contribute to risk-based approach.

"For many years, complying with government standards and industry regulations has been seen as a check box in the lengthy list of IT security tasks," said Torsten George, vice president of worldwide marketing at Agiliance, in a statement.

"In 2012, we will see progressive organizations applying a risk-based, continuous approach to security. By doing so, they will be able to make risk visible, measurable, and actionable," George added.

Five predictions of Agiliance include the following:

Under mobile devices and social media, new products and services will emerge that deal with the necessary delineation of employer-owned versus employee-owned data on mobile devices.

There will be an acceleration of efforts to create standards around cloud security, primarily driven by the data consolidation efforts of the U.S. government as well as support of the Cloud Security Alliance.

In the second half of 2012, a government mandate will be passed that will propagate the implementation of a pro-active Information Security Risk Management system and related best practices to tackle cyber security threats.

Sharing of sensitive threat information will become essential to prevent widespread cyber attacks across different verticals and industries.

There will be further increase in demand for software tools that are able to aggregate data from existing security tools and information management applications to make risk visible, measurable, and actionable.

Recently, Agiliance announced that the Agiliance Continuous Compliance Service for Cloud Risk Management has been named the Best Cloud Security Solution of the Year in the 2011 Computing Security Awards.