Digital Transformation
Reality Check: The Future is Closer Than You Think
Trend Micro Chief Marketing Officer, Leah MacMillan, discusses why this is the ideal moment to leverage the investments you are making in digital transformation to drive your business forward even faster but without adding significant new risk.
For many organizations, digital transformation has been an ongoing project for years. But the arrival of the global pandemic accelerated the need for new approaches to dealing with employees, customers, and partners around the world. Decision makers were thrust into a reality where reliance on newer technologies, like the cloud, were no longer part of the long-term plan, but rather an immediate need.
The value of digital transformation is clear but there are challenges
The business advantages that come from using the cloud for existing and new applications are obvious, as organizations experience a reduction of IT costs, improved flexibility, and increased performance, often within weeks. But there are challenges. With the increase of remote workers and proliferation of uncontrolled devices, your IT team has been migrating applications to the cloud along with building cloud-native applications to support the speed needed by the business. The result is that you’re now dealing with a broadened attack surface that includes many new vectors of attack, including software as a service (SaaS) and Internet of Things (IoT). Unfortunately the fact that decision-makers like you are aware of these risks also means that cybercriminals understand them and are looking to take advantage for their own gain. Threat actors are finding unpatched OSes and applications, taking advantage of risky user behavior, and looking for vulnerabilities inside open source code or just cloud misconfigurations.
The path to business resilience
As there’s no such thing as 100% protection against all threats, the key to navigating the challenges linked to digital transformation is putting a strategy in place that enables business resilience. DevOps teams require security that is automated and fits with their workflows. CISOs and security operations leaders need strategies that include less complexity and greater visibility across the entire environment. Security operations teams are looking for faster detection response across the entire enterprise and fewer, prioritized alerts instead of the normal overwhelming volume they face across the many stove-piped security applications in use. CISOs also need insights and best practices for dealing with global and regional compliance pressures and data privacy laws, alongside the widening cybersecurity skills gap.
Security is job one, and Zero Trust can help
An increasingly powerful approach to securing the digital transformation journey is to implement a Zero Trust strategy. This approach assumes that the validity of a user or safety of a device, inside or outside of the security perimeter, should not be defined strictly by trust in a single security approach—all must be verified to be trusted. Implementing a Zero Trust strategy is a journey itself, but the transition from siloed and disparate security products to an intelligent, centralized, connected cybersecurity platform provides IT teams with more visibility and richer insights. It can also allow security leaders to balance risk and compliance across their digital environment while still accelerating digital transformation.
Transcript
You know, certainly with the acceleration of digital transformation that you talked about, of course accelerated by the pandemic. We're seeing an environment now that is obviously extended, but more complex and challenging for everyone.
You've got more remote users that you have to get to work. You've got more cloud-native applications to deploy. You've got an extended network that's more extended than ever before, even including operational technical. And of course with the deployment of things like SaaS applications, IOT, cloud-native applications and services, you've actually got a broadened attack surface. Cybercriminals are finding unpatched OSes in applications. They're taking advantage of risky user behavior. They're taking advantage maybe of getting into your corporate network through your OT devices. And of course, they're looking for vulnerabilities in open source in the cloud or just cloud misconfigurations.
Now there's no greater transformation than what's happened in the cloud. You know, certainly a decade ago, people started moving workloads to the cloud, certainly for the cost and scale, but it has quickly become a strategic competitive advantage for most organizations. And at the speed of DevOps, we know that the pressure, that, pace is intense and we've heard from you, our cloud leaders, that the most important challenge that you have is that security cannot slow you down.
You want to have security that fits into your DevOps processes that is automated and fits with your workflow. That's easy for DevOps people so that it's not an afterthought. And ultimately that provides you with visibility across that entire environment. And of course, if you step back and look at that bigger environment, which of course has a larger, broader attack surface and with the increase in cyber threats and the impact of those threats, the job has never been more difficult for the CISO and the security operations leader.
And you've told us that your number one issue and your challenge is that you need faster detection response across the enterprise. Of course, as Eva talked about, you may be dealing with tens of thousands of alerts every single day. You might have 30 or 40 security tools across layers, which are disconnected, siloed so that you can't gain visibility across them.
And of course you're dealing with increased compliance pressures and data privacy laws, which makes everything that much more challenging. And often when you don't have enough cybersecurity resources on your team. We know that there's still about 3 million jobs posted for cybersecurity professionals around the world that are just unfilled.
And of course in this new environment, users and applications are everywhere. And that's certainly one of the key reasons that we're hearing from you, that you are already on your journey to Zero Trust, or you want to have that Zero Trust strategy in place. So we're going to talk a lot today about these challenges in more detail.
And we're also going to talk about our approach with a cybersecurity platform. We do have product portfolios that deal with the areas of transformation. For example, in the data center to cloud and hybrid cloud, we have Trend Micro Cloud One™, which is our cloud security services platform, which is really enabling you to shift left securely.
We've got (Trend Micro) Apex One™, which is all about protecting users and applications, wherever they are. And we've got (Trend Micro) Network One™, which provides you that breach prevention, breach detection, and even all the way out to OT, all of your networking environments, we have the protection.
And at the heart of our cybersecurity platform is (Trend Micro) Vision One™. This is really an intelligent, powerful cyber threat defense center designed specifically for you, the CISO and security operations leaders. It provides you with that centralized, connected visibility. It provides you with prioritized alerts, cross-layer detection and response, and new risk insights that really help you on your journey to Zero Trust.
So we'll learn more about this throughout the day. I know the Trend Micro product experts are excited to show you demos and to talk further about these cases. So if I take a step back and I say, you know, “what are the three biggest dynamics and challenges that we're all facing?” First of all, it's that the pace is incredible.
We all dealing with this acceleration and job number one as a security person is to enable the business to go forward. Of course, we can't take our eyes off that ever-changing threat landscape. And of course we need to manage and balance risk and compliance across our environment as well.