2020 started with COVID-19 and a pell-mell shift to remote work, and finished with the gut-punch of a major breach that put hundreds of organizations into frantic assess-and-remediate mode. The year will be seen as one of the most consequential in any security professional’s career. For many, there will be a bright line dividing how things were before the pandemic from how they are now, as we hope to rapidly vaccinate our way out of it.

The consequences of the pandemic’s rapid shift to work-from-home — and the exponentially faster shift to cloud technology that it helped drive — include less visibility into the security ecosystem, less control of access points, and a larger, more varied attack surface for adversaries to target.