Research Educause Horizon Report: Sustainability Pressures Lead to Increased Cybersecurity Risks
Rhea Kelly
October 7, 2024
Educause recently released the 2024 Cybersecurity and Privacy Edition of its Horizon Report series, forecasting key trends, technologies, and practices shaping the future of cybersecurity and privacy in higher education. The report pulls together insights from 39 expert panelists from around the globe, who ranked trends across five categories: Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political.
The technological trends identified in the report this year should come as no surprise to anyone:
Cybersecurity and privacy risks and threats are growing.
Cyber attacks are increasingly sophisticated.
Technology is constantly and rapidly changing.
More notable, though, is the way environmental trends are impacting cybersecurity. For example: “New risks are … being introduced as higher education institutions are facing growing pressure to be sustainable and are continuing to integrate sustainable technologies, which tend to expand the cyber attack surface,” the report pointed out. In addition, “concerns over the environmental impact of AI are increasing, posing a potential challenge for cybersecurity teams who rely on AI-driven security tools,” the report said. In other words, sustainability efforts are both increasing cybersecurity risk and restricting cybersecurity teams’ ability to combat threats.
