When it comes to cybersecurity, geographical boundaries are blurring as cyberthreats transcend borders. However, organizations must adapt to regional nuances.
Which trends will shape cybersecurity strategies and challenges in 2024 in your region? Let’s take a look.
Thriving regulations
While European countries will be massively occupied with NIS2 compliance, cybersecurity resilience in regulations gains importance. France and the German-speaking countries of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (DACH) will prioritize compliance with the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). This will be even more in Austria with the Digital Operational Resilience Act and the Directive on the Resilience of Critical Entities.
Furthermore, data privacy and consumer data protection concerns increase in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region, Canada, and the USA, where several state data privacy laws will be updated and/or introduced.
Moreover, defense against cyber threats intensifies and formalizes, with an emphasis on reporting incidents (USA) and more specifically ransomware attacks or ransom payments in Asia.
In parallel, the quantum risk is gaining consideration, especially in USA and in France that initiate their migration to post-quantum cryptography (PQC).
Tech it easy
Advanced Detection and Response plays a major part in the cybersecurity technologies currently adopted, especially MDR and EDR globally. In North America, CSMA is also at partial adoption.
Cloud security is gaining ground in the United Kingdom and Ireland (UK&I), and MEA region, whether with cloud security technologies in general, or Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) adoption which is in a nascent stage in the UK.
On the other hand, Operational Technology (OT) security gains importance, slowly but surely, in the DACAH and MEA regions. France sets itself apart with a strong push on data encryption technologies adoption, and threat intelligence spreading wide. Application Programming Interface (API) Security though remains in early adoption stages in France.
Finally, North America is well advanced in their Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption journey, which has spread wide and fast.
Major investments by public organizations
Cloud security will represent a significant domain of investment in Europe and MEA. With the recent rise and spread of LLM, , AI and GenAI will attract major investments worldwide. Finally, data security, whether in general or more specifically PQC, will trigger significant investments respectively in MEA and North America.
Data breaches
Unsurprisingly, the healthcare and public sector remain targets of interest for malicious actors. However, there is a prominent difference between the DACH region, where there are small local incidents, and the MEA region, where there are nation-state attacks.
>> Learn more about 2024’s cybersecurity trends in different geographies
