Sunil Paul, managing director of Finesse, highlights the importance of restructuring cybersecurity strategies to realize digital transformation promise securely.
Organizations across verticals are fast-tracking their digital agendas by automating their operations to increase efficiencies and offer enhanced customer experiences.
With the rise of digital enterprises, cybersecurity has gained prominence and made its way into boardroom discussions. The fact that these boardroom discussions are now happening on video collaboration platforms is proof that cybersecurity strategies need to be redesigned to embrace digital transformation truly.
Securing multi-cloud environments
Digitalization is a vital business objective. As part of this plan, organizations today are leveraging multi-cloud strategies to improve IT operations and provide better services to their customers. This means ensuring strong security across clouds, networks, applications, and data is critical for them to achieve the advantages of multi-cloud environments.
In line with this, it is imperative that businesses have to put clear protocols for cloud governance and access controls right from the beginning of developing a multi-cloud strategy. It is also essential to make sure every workload in these environments is adequately protected. Business leaders should not be asleep at the wheel when it comes to securing data and workloads in the cloud.
However, securing multi-cloud environments is not without challenges. Native security tools offered by cloud providers, while advantageous, are not sufficient to work across clouds. An ideal approach is deploying security tools such as a unified platform security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) technology to gain a centralized view and control of the threats and vulnerabilities across a multi-cloud environment. This will provide security teams with the capability to analyze threat data better and prioritize alerts.
Business leaders should understand that cybersecurity needs to be a constant thought, especially as cyber adversaries exploit any circumstance and get more creative in their attacks by the day.
Enforcing security by design approaches
That being said, it is now more important than ever to ensure cybersecurity is not an afterthought. Believe it or not, most organizations continue to procrastinate on security. This is further seen in a recent report by EY Global Information Security Survey. It revealed that only 36% of organizations admitted that cybersecurity was involved right from a new business initiative’s planning stage. Businesses cannot afford to invest in technology and think of adding the security layer at a later stage. They need to invest in technologies that are embedded with security solutions.
Having security by design approach considers cyber risks and security right from any technology implementation impetus and should foster trust at every stage. Moreover, this kind of approach focuses not only on technologies but also on the way an organization functions. It is important to ensure that everyone within the organization has a cyber risk-aware mindset. While making this cultural shift is challenging, it is vital for the success of any security strategy; after all, cybersecurity is everyone’s responsibility.
Bridging the gap between IT teams and C-level
There cannot be any room for disconnects or misalignments between IT security teams and the C-suite when rethinking security for digital transformation, laying down policies for securing assets, and assessing other risk areas. Bridging this gap is imperative because both parties are unequivocally affected in the event of a cybersecurity breach. Strong communication between the IT team and the C-suite also ensures that investments in security solutions are prioritized. While the C-level executives may not be armed with technical knowledge, they must be aware of the consequences of poor security measures and how it can directly or indirectly impact business profitability.
Fortifying the interconnected future
Increased digitalization across verticals is leading to a proliferation of connected devices and technologies. This, in turn, increases the attack surface area offering new playgrounds for cybercriminals. Safeguarding interconnected devices, technology, and networks is the future. Cybersecurity technologies and strategies have to be revamped to take into consideration the millions of devices that are now highly susceptible to cyber breaches. If a perpetrator breaks into a single IoT endpoint, they can effortlessly access corporate networks, hack into sensitive data and create havoc.
The threat and severity of cyber-attacks are growing. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a wake-up call for most organizations in terms of evaluating where they are in digital journeys and how prepared they are to tackle cyber threats. Cybersecurity strategies also need to be ever-evolving to stay in tune with ongoing market developments. We have to reassess our present cybersecurity strategies to leverage the complete potential of being digitally transformed.
