Walk the show floor at any security event, and you will be inundated with a multitude of purportedly cutting-edge and disruptive security technologies. When every vendor claims that their solution is unique, and that no security program would be complete without it, how do you cut through the noise to pinpoint what you must pay attention to and invest in? We give you a leg up in our new report, “The Top Security Technology Trends To Watch, 2019,” in which we highlight eight of the most influential and important security technologies this year. Forrester security and risk analysts drew insight from our client inquiry data, market insights, and research projects to identify these eight technologies and explain why each will disrupt and its trajectory for the next three years. Some key findings include:

  • Multiple factors contribute to the disruptiveness of a technology. Funding is just the first step in a journey of a disruptive technology. For a technology to have lasting influence, it must significantly improve current approaches and have a system in place to promote and implement it, as well as enhance security and risk practices.
  • Decisive new security and risk technologies will transform day-to-day work for security practitioners. The eight disruptive technologies we evaluated share a common theme of new methods to automate and source data. These new technologies will use automation to deliver security in new ways, such as blockchain to verify data integrity or encrypting data in use. Others will protect apps using serverless architecture. New data sources such as biometrics will improve identity verification, and data sources that fuel budgeting decisions will have improved visibility in the dashboards of chief information security officers.
  • Disruptive security and risk technologies prioritize customer experience and employee experience. In our methodology for evaluating the disruptiveness of new technologies, two of the six criteria are customer experience impact and employee experience impact. Truly disruptive technologies enhance consumer security as well as contribute to positive employee experience. They often reduce the amount of repetitive tasks through automation technologies or alleviate the complexity of their IT environment.

Cut through all the hype and use these key metrics of disruption as a basis to create a company-specific disruption score, or use ours and our technology trends to discover what’s around the corner to change the future of work in security.

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