At Forrester, it is our goal to be ahead of the market trends so we can advise clients on what is to come and how they should prepare. Each year, we publish a series of predictions reports about what may be of primary concern for various roles over the course of the coming year. Rather than using our market insight and intuition to predict what may happen in technology and business, what if we were able to see the future? If we could go in a time machine, what would differentiate businesses’ security postures and practices 10, 50, or even 100 years into the future?

Unfortunately, Forrester has not built a time machine (yet!), but several reports that the security and risk team has published in the last month can help practitioners prepare their security programs for far in the future:

  • Bad bot traffic has increasingly become a security concern in recent years and likely will continue to be an issue in the future. Organizations need to do a much better job of combating them or suffer their scraping, fraud, inventory hoarding, credential stuffing, web recon, and checkout abuse. See Amy DeMartine’s “Forrester Infographic: Build A Better Bot Management Program” to help security pros build a bot management program that thwarts attacks and shares data about attack trends.
  • In the future, companies will have new considerations when choosing business partners. Similarly, consumers of the future will also gravitate toward brands they trust and whose values align with theirs. To prepare, you must undertake an ethical transformation. See Renee Murphy and Sal Schiano’s most recent report, “Make Your Digital Transformation An Ethical One,” to identify the need and make the case for an ethical transformation alongside a digital one.
  • Healthcare organizations have been a frequent target for cyberattackers. With increased budgets, healthcare companies of the future will likely be more technologically and security-savvy. Chris Sherman, Sal Schiano, and Jeff Becker’s report, “The US Healthcare Security Benchmark, 2018 To 2019,” helps healthcare technology professionals learn from their peers and provides recommendations for addressing critical technology risks.
  • Identity and access management (IAM) capabilities are critical in the fight to protect customers from account takeover, identity theft, and privacy abuses. These same technologies are also vital to protecting employee experience, driving both operational efficiencies and productivity. These technologies and subsequent advancements will continue to play a huge role in the future of business and security. See Andras Cser and Merritt Maxim’s updated report, “The Future Of Identity And Access Management,” which helps security pros understand how to use IAM to enable digital transformation initiatives and new business models in the next two years.
  • Due to the dynamic nature of data protection legislation, we update our global data privacy map whenever there are significant changes to relevant legislation. Our newest version, “Forrester’s Global Map Of Privacy Rights And Regulations, 2019,” includes government surveillance, cross-border data transfers, consumer rights, regulatory enforcement, and data center locations for 61 countries. With the precedent of GDPR, more privacy regulations are being introduced and the map is likely to continue to change.

(Written with Elsa Pikulik, senior research associate at Forrester)