BYOD or bring your own device should have been a forewarning of things to come. But it took the COVID-19 pandemic for enterprises to take action to address the security hole that mobility has brought to the enterprise.
COVID-19 has forced many companies to enforce remote working for majority of employees. Like other cities in Asia, employees in Hong Kong have raised their concern over cybersecurity and inadequacy of guidelines for the remote workplace.
Joining PodChats for FutureCIO is Joe Signorelli, vice president, Asia Pacific Japan, for Pulse Secure, to talk about the security challenges companies are grappling with in 2020.
According to Signorelli COVID-19 has raised the profile of topics like remote access, multiple device management, single policy engines and simplifying security profiles of users.
In the software-defined era, he goes on to comment that organisations are more accepting of the concept of zero trust architectures which does not allow anything into the parameter or into the infrastructure until it has been authenticated and secured.
He explained that security is no longer limited to computing devices that attach to the network. These days devices like printers and cameras, for example, can become conduits for which cybercriminals can launch attacks on the enterprises because these peripheral devices are themselves connected to the network but do not have same sophisticated technologies installed to protect against hacking.
Provisioning security in 2021
Gartner research suggests that 48% of employees will work remotely at least some of the time in the post-pandemic world, compared with 30% before. Signorelli concurs and adds that companies are discovering that employees are more productive working from home.
For the CIO and the CISO the challenge becomes securing the infrastructure differently because the connection is no longer limited to the desktop.
Click on the podchat player to listen to the details of the dialogue as Signorelli shares his observations, opinion and recommendation on the topics below:
- COVID-19 saw an uptake in VPNs. Has the interest waned? Where do you see this headed in 2021?
- Networking and security vendors say that with mobility, cloud and virtualization, the perimeter is borderless. How does this impact the ability of CIOs and CISOs to keep the borderless network secure?
- One of the notable technology evolutions of the last few years has been the rise of software defined. In the area of security, what is your take on software defined perimeter (SDP)?
- Does SDP add any latency to the user experience?
- What are the challenges for organisations looking to architect a SDP strategy that maps to this zero trust initiatives we are starting to hear about?
- What do you see are the top 3 considerations for CIOs/CISOs/CFOs (they pay for investments) when implementing SDP?
- As security vendors like Ivanti expand through M&A, will it confuse enterprises in terms of what they associate a brand to the problem it solves?
- What will the provision of security look like in 2021?
