The threat landscape is rapidly changing, especially as technological advancements change how enterprises are doing business. On the flip side of this, attackers are also using technology to fuel new types of attacks and sophisticated threat actors are challenging traditional cybersecurity risk management. As businesses continue to modernize their front-end experiences with emerging technologies, they may need to rethink their cybersecurity strategies to meet the pace of evolving threats.

To prepare for the cybersecurity landscape of today and tomorrow, enterprise leaders should reimagine their cybersecurity programs – first looking at how the business is operating with technology (e.g., artificial intelligence (AI) working alongside humans to automate tasks, write code) and then creating new secure and resilient solutions. This transformation should enable use of next-generation tools, such as AI, across the IT stack, to help strengthen overall cybersecurity posture and process to create a more secure enterprise of the future.

Fortify with AI

As emerging technologies like AI evolve, bad actors are similarly evolving their tactics to find new ways to exploit vulnerabilities. In Deloitte Global’s Future of Cyber 4 edition survey, security leaders cited the pace of these changing threats to be a top strategic challenge. That same report found that respondents are increasingly concerned with the risks of AI/generative AI (genAI), such as threat-actors becoming more sophisticated with AI-powered tactics including social engineering attacks such as deepfakes.

However, cybersecurity leaders can use emerging technology to adapt to these advancing threats – in other words, they can tackle AI with AI. There are several ways to do this, especially with the promise of agentic AI looming. While genAI has started to expedite processes by answering complex questions for cybersecurity teams to act on, the future state of humans working alongside AI agents to defend enterprises and build resilience is bright. Agentic AI takes genAI a step further – not just answering a question or providing content/information, but by making automatic decisions based on data.

This is particularly important in times of crisis to enable true data- and risk-based decision making. In the future, enterprises will likely utilize multi-model AI agents to correlate vast amounts of data to anomalies, or needles in haystacks, to uncover new and previously undetected threats.

Simplify cybersecurity

Deloitte research found that almost half (41%) of surveyed security leaders report that securing the necessary budget is a critical barrier to improving their organization’s security posture, which means leaders often need to leverage their existing budgets for emerging threats. This requires leaders to take a holistic look at their existing budget and reprioritize as needed based on the evolving cybersecurity landscape – with the goal of operating through a unified pane of glass for increased visibility.

To do this, cybersecurity leaders can rationalize the security tool landscape to an optimal mix of platform-based capabilities and point solutions, while transforming and upskilling their workforce to adopt platform-based capabilities in tandem. This not only helps streamline resources, but helps the organization stay aligned on what tools to leverage and when.

Build resilience

Organizations often have boilerplate recovery strategies, which may result in the need to “figure things out” in the middle of a crisis and can lead to operational disruption and high costs. In fact, surveyed cybersecurity leaders indicate that operational disruption is the biggest impact of cyberattacks. With cybersecurity incidents on the rise, it has never been more important for leaders to take a resilience by design approach.

Organizations should align on a holistic, modern approach to resiliency can help reduce the impact of incidents and allow business confidence to move ahead rapidly given logistics should already be sorted out. As part of this strategy, leaders should make sure they have an ongoing focus on building telemetry to make data-driven decisions during incidents. While it’s impossible to plan for every scenario, it’s essential to consider what potential emerging threats could be next and practice resiliency plans to troubleshoot them in advance – this includes broadening business continuity plans (BCP) and disaster recovery (DR) simulations beyond table-top exercises using testing techniques like chaos engineering.

Maintaining the fundamentals

These three areas — fortifying with AI, simplifying cybersecurity, and building resilience — work together to help organizations be better prepared for the future. And, while it’s essential for enterprises to prepare actively for what’s changing, focusing on fundamentals is equally important. Aspects like cybersecurity and data hygiene, visibility, and cybersecurity culture can make or break cybersecurity operations.

By focusing on the scope of changing business operations and technology while staying true to the fundamentals, leaders can get ahead of the curve and set their organization up for a more secure tomorrow.