Cybersecurity has always been a never-ending race, but the rate of change is accelerating. Companies are continuing to invest in technology to run their businesses. Now, they are layering more systems into their IT networks to support remote work, enhance the customer experience, and generate value, all of which creates potential new vulnerabilities. This article is a collaborative effort by Jim Boehm, Dennis Dias, Charlie Lewis, Kathleen Li, and Daniel Wallance, representing views from McKinsey's Risk & Resilience Practice. At the same time, adversaries--no longer limited to individual actors--include highly sophisticated organizations that leverage integrated tools and capabilities with artificial intelligence and machine learning. The scope of the threat is growing, and no organization is immune.

The year 2020 has inarguably been an unprecedented year for humanity. With a global pandemic upending people's lives, the cyber world has been no less affected. On the upside, the virus-enforced digital transition in nearly all aspects of our lives has created massive momentum and scale for the uptake of cyber technologies. However, the downside is the increased opportunities this creates for unethical hackers and cyber criminals. In this backdrop, how is the cyber security landscape going to unfold this year?

Just about everyone agrees cybersecurity will be paramount in 2020, and governments and regulatory bodies are already taking action. While GDPR allows citizens in Europe to manage their digital footprint and data, the EU's Cybersecurity Act provides strong support for member nations to alert one another and act against bad actors. Still, cybersecurity is a difficult line of work. It's dynamic, and IT pros often feel harrowed by the amount of ground they're expected to cover. Instead of seeing what new cybersecurity trends will develop in 2020, we thought we'd ask the experts.

Don't miss the rest of the articles in our Cybersecurity Trends in 2020 series: To say that artificial intelligence (AI) has reached buzzword status may be an understatement. The general public largely misunderstands the term while the C-suite can't get enough of it. A layperson may consider AI a thing of the future, like flying cars and drone grocery delivery, but in reality most of today's business and commercial software contain AI and its little sister, machine learning (ML). And nearly any software developer will tell you--repeatedly--that these tools are little more than statistical probability. They analyze existing data, take action, and make predictions based on the data they have. Over the past several years, we've seen cybersecurity software vendors employ AI to identify security risks on software and networks.

Cybersecurity is a hot topic for organizations across every industry. Securing networks, hardening systems, and protecting data from cyber threats has become more important than ever, as cyber incidents are on the rise. We asked a few of our C-level industry experts what they think we'll see as cybersecurity trends in 2019 – here's what they had to say: If I'm thinking of cybersecurity trends, I'm led to the following: Utilization of data across the enterprise – As data is shared across an organization, it must be secured. One way to better understand data utilization and security is to apply analytics, data science, and predictive machine learning (ML) models. As a new crop of data science graduates move into security-related positions, this will spur industry recognition of how the application of data models can result in better, more effective security.

With 2017 coming to an end, we can get a glimpse of what's yet to come in the next 12 months through the number of investments and product testing. It's no surprise that financial institutions were the first players to experiment with blockchain technology since 2014 and became active investors in the space that totalled $4.5 billion of funding in 2017. In the past few years, financial institutions were testing blockchain technology and working on proof of concepts. By 2017, this largely moved into production stages. In 2017, a group of 11 international banks developed a trade finance application using R3 technology.

Digital transformation is rapidly moving the transportation industry from a closed, proprietary and analog ecosystem to open, networked, always-on mobility platform. It is already a prime example of the efficiency and revenue-generating potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) and soon, as we are promised by legacy and upstart automakers, it will become the prototype of the autonomous, AI-driven, robotic future. Becoming digital, however, means a new life in the cybersecurity trenches. Cisco's 2017 Midyear Cybersecurity Report includes interesting findings from a survey of 180 chief information security officers and security operations professionals in the transportation industry. Here are the highlights, buttressed by commentary from Joe Kirk, CIO of the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT), "moving Tennessee forward" for more than 100 years and winner of a 2017 National Roadway Safety Award.

Greg Ferro, writing in Ethereal Mind, examined a new release from Intel subsidiary, Movidius. The vendor is launching a Neural Compute Stick, which it first demonstrated at CES 2017. Described as an "AI accelerator" on a USB drive, the product is intended to boost Intel's deep learning and AI capabilities and play off Movidius' 2016 launch of Fathom NCS. The ultimate goal for the product is to provide developers with a low-power option for developing offline AI applications. In Ferro's view, AI computation for as little as $80 at retail might help to improve network telemetry and path selection.