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Moreover, many of the the forecasts that feature in our Cover story for this issue also raised their heads, in one guise or another, in 2014. The difference is that their impact this year is likely to even more devastating, if strong safeguards aren't put into effect.

For example, Barry Scott, CTO, EMEA at Centrify, believes that 2015 will bring more Heartbleeds, Shellshocks and high-profile breaches. "Enterprises will need to focus more on Privileged Identity Management and adopt best practices, such as least-access and least-privilege, to reduce attack surface and reduce exposure when problems occur," he warns. "Users today usually have too much access to too many resources, from too many places, using too many identities, which can't be allowed to continue."

Others warn that the 'Internet of Things' will call for greater network-level awareness to prevent security issues, with the growth in IoT services and devices driving an upsurge in application-to-person (A2P) messaging traffic.

Meanwhile, Juniper Research argues that, in the wake of a number of high-profile security breaches, cloud service providers will need to regain trust (at both the enterprise and consumer level). "Thus, we expect to see an increasing array of companies investing in encryption and tokenisation solutions as a means of reducing the risk of data loss or theft during 2015," it states.

As with tokenisation, biometrics (see page 18) are now widely perceived as a way to enhance end user identification and transactional authentication, across an array of technologies. As Juniper adds: ""In mobile, the combination of Apple Pay with Touch ID is perhaps the most high-profile example, but we envisage that markets where the mobile device is already used for personal authentication [such as Scandinavia and the Baltic states] will rapidly incorporate biometrics as an additional factor."

The technology is also entering the card space, it says: biometric technology developer IDEX has recently agreed to provide fingerprint sensor technology to Card Tech for incorporation into a digital card.

So, the overall message from our main feature is that 2015 will be an even more challenging year - and for 'challenging' read 'potentially nightmarish'. But forewarned is, as ever, forearmed and the best prepared will hopefully not only survive, but thrive.

Brian Wall
Editor
Computing Security
brian.wall@btc.co.uk