“The Future of Cybersecurity in 2021 and Beyond”

In Jack M. Germain’s article, “The Future of Cybersecurity in 2021 and Beyond,” a growing concern over the constantly increasing occurrence of cyberattacks is highlighted, and the associated damages of such attacks, primarily financial, are made apparent. In recent decades, the migration to cloud services has made accessing, sharing, and storing much easier for users, while providing the big cloud service providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and many others a large profit. The downside of this situation, however, is that cloud breaches are much more prone to take place when large quantities of user information are now easily accessible by cybercriminals via the cloud. Hence, Germain’s article does not argue against the continued use of the cloud, but rather urges safer and more secure implementations of cloud infrastructure to complement the widespread transition to cloud storage and databases.

There is currently a high and growing demand for strong, cloud-based security techniques as the cloud begins to overtake the digital landscape. Such demand has reached its peak during the pandemic, during which a bulk of daily interactions, transactions, and operations have taken place virtually and been enabled by the various services offered by cloud service platforms. This requires substantial emphasis by IT specialists on securing and supporting this new business model of virtual networking, particularly combatting ransomware which has become one of the largest threats to businesses. As ransomware and attack methods taken by cybercriminals continue to evolve, “trust” must be continuously reevaluated and revised within the cybersecurity industry. Tools and cloud infrastructure itself rather than specific databases are increasingly becoming the targets of cyberattacks. Presently, there is a massive responsibility placed on IT specialists at these cloud service companies to innovate their processes of authorizing users and granting access, while strengthening their firewalls and encryption capabilities against brand new, unexpected methods of organized cybercrime.