The ‘Cisco 2021 Security Outcomes Study’ which surveyed 4,800 security, IT and privacy professionals across 25 countries found that enabling business, managing risk and operating efficiently as the most commonly desired business outcomes from implemented security measures. Adele Trombetta, Vice President, Customer Experience, Cisco Middle East and Africa and Technology Transformation Group Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia, discusses how intertwining a fabric of trust to enable harmonious Digital Transformation.
In the last 12 months, the mass shift to remote working and accelerated digitisation has caused organisations of all sizes to experience vast change, with none more impacted than IT teams who suddenly found themselves dealing with highly distributed teams.
Globally, we are continuing to witness the expansion of the security perimeter, resulting from two key factors: increasing employee mobility and widespread IoT and cloud adoption – neither of which are set to slow down. Each of these elements presents organisations with a double-edged sword, empowering newfound levels of agility and streams for growth, while also widening the visibility gap.
Cisco’s 2021 Security Outcomes Study surveyed 4,800 security, IT and privacy professionals across 25 countries. The findings identified ‘enabling the business’, ‘managing risk’ and ‘operating efficiently’ as the most commonly desired business outcomes from implemented security measures.
The pandemic has certainly played a role in accelerating Digital Transformation timelines, in some cases, from years to a mere matter of weeks. Above all, the current environment has made security a non-negotiable topic of discussion.
As the pressure mounted, world leaders congregated virtually, as in the case of the Saudi Arabia-hosted G20 Summit. Organisations with high security needs, such as those within financial services found themselves increasingly reliant on cloud infrastructures to enable greater agility and sustained growth.
At a regional level in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia (EMEAR), Cisco’s Security Outcomes Study found that organisations with a well-integrated technology stack are on average, 14.3% more likely to succeed. Yet, as organisations continue to invest in cloud solutions from multiple vendors, they can struggle to deal with the fragmented nature, increasing complexity and lack of control when it comes to data management, policy adherence and security integration.
To truly protect their assets, companies must consider security within three distinct and equally import dimensions. Firstly, they must deliberate which solution domains require protection, be they workforce, workplace or workload. Secondly, decision makers must determine which control points they need to guarantee. In the industry, we refer to these points of consideration as ‘identify and trust’, ‘protect and isolate’ and ‘detect and respond’. Lastly, but by no means least, one must also think carefully about the type of services they will purchase from an external provider.
Cisco is uniquely positioned to offer solutions across all three security dimensions, with a focus on driving transformation and accelerating time to value, with reduced risk across every security platform domain.
This ability comes as a result of extensive experience, which has enabled Cisco to accumulate a rich history of threat intelligence. Our broad portfolio of security services offers seamless and efficient integration across the full attack continuum – whether implementing a location agnostic operation based on zero trust architecture or adopting cloud and hyper – automated systems via a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework.
Crucially, Cisco’s security solutions can be scaled, regardless of the number of attackers, inspiring greater confidence with a stronger and more secure perimeter to protect against threats. Security must involve more than just defence and containment measures, which is why our solutions also work to learn from each targeted attack. We leverage AI to understand how cyberthreats work and how to automate and remediate against them in the future.
As network architecture becomes increasingly complex, security must be weaved in the very fabric of IT infrastructure and be at the heart of every business strategy. Security must ultimately not exist just at endpoints, but also at every layer in between.
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