The metaverse is on its way, and it will arrive sooner than you think. According to Gartner, a quarter of individuals will spend at least an hour every day in the metaverse by 2026. This is fantastic news for businesses since it will open the door to new business models and methods of working that will bring value in ways we can only speculate about right now. “How businesses connect with consumers, how work is done, what products and services enterprises offer, how they create and distribute them, and how they run their organizations,” says Accenture.
The metaverse, on the other hand, poses a number of security issues for businesses. Most firms today are having trouble safeguarding their existing data and infrastructure. This will become much more difficult in the multidimensional metaverse. The metaverse is still on the move. We are now at a comparable stage in the development lifecycle of the internet as we were in the early 1990s. However, unlike in the 1990s, we now have a far greater understanding of the kind of risks that might arise in large digital ecosystems, allowing us to be much more prepared for what comes next.
The answer is to get started right away, with an industry-wide effort to address and alleviate metaverse concerns before they become a problem. What dangers will the metaverse entail? Similar security difficulties will be faced in the metaverse, but they will be tailored to the diverse types of engagement, interaction, and access that come with immersive, virtual settings.
Aggression, bullying, harassment, and exploitation abound on social networking sites. There’s no reason to believe these blights won’t have an impact on the metaverse. With this in mind, I believe there are four essential questions concerning the metaverse that all CISOs and IT teams should be addressing today: Can PII (and other sensitive data) be protected in the metaverse?
Securing personally identifiable information (PII) is already a top priority for companies, thanks to laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, and China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PRPL). The metaverse has no bearing on businesses’ legal responsibility to protect personally identifiable information. However, it does exponentially increase the quantity of personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data that enterprises will gather, keep, and manage in order to offer metaverse experiences.
Much of this data will come from biometric devices, smart speakers and microphones, and virtual reality headsets, which enable the merging of the digital and physical worlds that constitutes the metaverse. As PII becomes more prevalent, data governance, endpoint security, network security, and other factors will become increasingly crucial.
Such capabilities must be given in a way that does not degrade the underlying network’s performance. After all, consumers would rapidly abandon a sluggish, twitchy metaverse. How can I verify user identities? Another issue that current enterprise technologies face is determining how to validate people’s identities when they use sensitive digital services like banking apps or corporate networks.
