I have often joked that IT, and in particular cybersecurity, is like fashion — not a lot is ever new, just reimagined and, in some cases, improved. As I sit pondering the beauty of my COVID-19 comb-over mullet, I have found myself thinking about how this fashion analogy applies to zero trust.

On Monday, June 21st, Microsoft updated a previously reported vulnerability (CVE-2021-1675) to increase its severity from Low to Critical and its impact to Remote Code Execution. On Tuesday, June 29th, a security researcher posted a working proof-of-concept named PrintNightmare that affects virtually all versions of Windows systems. Yesterday, July 1, Microsoft assigned this flaw a new CVE, CVE-2021-34527.

2020 was a challenging year for modern enterprises. In under a year, we experienced a decade's worth of transformation while a global pandemic raged on. And while the worst of COVID-19 will hopefully soon be behind us, the need to continuously transform our digital environment is unequivocally here to stay. We've already seen an example of this, thanks to a significant increase in data generated from across the business.

We have a saying at Splunk. It goes something like “if you’re ever having a bad day, go and talk to a customer”. What organizations around the world are doing with their data and Splunk brings a huge smile and an eyebrow raising, positive “can’t quite believe you’ve done that” very-impressed nod of the head. That’s never more true than with our security customers.

For years, security practitioners have kicked and screamed about their reality. There are too many alerts to fully investigate and manually resolve every day. There is a massive talent shortage of qualified security professionals across the globe. Then couple that with analyst burnout and siloed security point-products. All of these factors are preventing security operation centers (SOCs) from operating at their full potential, with increased efficiency, performance and speed.