The impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) has created unique and unprecedented challenges for the entire world. For many organizations, we've been forced to figure out how to stay operational in a virtual world, meaning a large shift in employees who are now working remotely from home. As it relates to security, this situation is forcing many enterprises to enable remote work access via the cloud.
Now more than ever, cloud is considered a partner to the business, and cloud technology enables organizations to continue to progress by relying less on local conditions. According to a March 6 Forbes article, our current situation "validates the need for the maintenance of corporate functionality based on cloud technologies." As organizations seek to sustain productivity in this era of work from home, it's essential to explore and adopt to cloud offerings.
Cloud is a top priority and investment area for CISOs in 2020.
According to the trends we collected at this year's RSA conference in February, the number one goal for CISOs this year is a focus on cloud. We also asked security leaders to list their top 5 investment areas for the year and cloud was the second most popular answer, behind automation efforts.
In our article on 2020 Cybersecurity Trends in the March 2020 Issue of Feats of Strength, NetScout CSO Deb Briggs explains on page 8 that "securing our data, migrating to the cloud in a thoughtful, efficient manner, and keeping the lines of visibility open throughout these processes is of the utmost importance for our organization this year."
Her sentiments are echoed by Ashutosh Sharma, VP and Research Director, Forrester, who states in The Economic Times that security leaders "will look at the cloud more seriously than before – both for business continuity, workforce enablement and in general to de-risk their operations. These reasons are not new but the acceleration in cloud adoption to solve these problems is expected as the situation starts to become normal."
Cloud adoption has helped enable an increasingly mobile workforce.
The coronavirus pandemic has triggered what Bloomberg calls the “world’s largest work-from-home experiment.” Companies are suddenly having to enable an increasingly mobile workforce, requiring CISOs to consider how to manage:
- Productivity decrease due to Internet access and bandwidth issue
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
- Assuring identities of remote workers
- The limits of VPNs
- Digital identities as it relates to separation of personal and corporate accounts
- And more
According to the same Forbes article on the business impact of COVID-19, though dependable and secure remote work technology has been available for years, "the cloud has pushed the scalability, availability, and security of these solutions to new heights. Thanks to cloud technologies, a world of web-based apps, virtual desktops, endpoint encryption, conferencing software, Virtual Private Networking (VPN), and other cloud-enhanced tools make remote work possible from nearly any device, anywhere in the world."
Businesses are transforming at a lightning pace and many security leaders are focused on moving many on-premise applications to the cloud.
In the December 2019 Issue of Feats of Strength we interviewed Visionworks CISO Sean Walls. On page 7, he explains, that Visionworks is currently undergoing a full-scale digital transformation. Walls says they are adopting certain emerging technologies as well as migrating systems to the cloud. This transformation will enable them to be more efficient, competitive, resilient, and nimbler, but also provide visibility into the market, their customers, their performance, and how they can improve their service offerings.
When we asked CISOs what they expect to be the biggest trends in 2020 and beyond, several mentioned the focus on cloud. On page 13 of our March 2020 Feats of Strength issue, David Levine, CSO at Ricoh explained that "cloud will continue to be a big push in 2020." On that same page, Tom Murphy, CISO at University of Miami echoed his thought by stating that "security in hybrid and multi-cloud environments is going to be right at the top of trends."
Security leaders are aware of the importance of cloud adoption and are determined to to keep pace with the ever-evolving nature of cybersecurity. While situations like COVID-19 are impossible to predict, business continuity is a top priority for organizations as they focus on enabling remote work from anywhere. This experience will be a stronger accelerant to a cloud-first world.
At K logix, we are going through these unprecedented changes along with our customers and partners. Through our offerings, we aim to ensure cybersecurity strengthens business during this time. Paired with our unique insight from the CISO community, our strategic role in critical businesses, and our thought leadership in the field of information security risk management, we can help move your security program forward in addressing emergent risk.
Drop us a line for more information on how we can work together to strengthen your program.
Want more? Read our March 2020 of Feats of Strength issue focused on 2020 Cybersecurity Trends.
Listen to our Webinar on Reducing Complexity with Dmitriy Sokolovskiy, CISO at Avid, who addresses the current work from home situation in addition to explaining how he clears the security product clutter and chooses the best solutions for his organization.
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