Industry Trends
Adapting to the new digital economy requires organizations to not just retool their networks, but in many cases, core business processes as well. The creation, exchange, and analysis of data – about customers, products, and their usage – enables organizations to gain the insights they need to improve operational efficiency, business agility, and the customer experience.
The three pillars of digital business are automation, agility, and analytics. As the speed of business accelerates, critical processes need to occur at digital speeds, which means that human beings, and human error, need to be removed from many of the basic operations that support the organization. Automation allows critical personnel to be reassigned to higher-order projects that rely on real-time analysis of growing volumes of data in order to enable agile business.
This same data must also be protected as it moves across systems, applications, devices, and the multi-cloud. Which means that security needs to be able to seamlessly extend to the farthest reaches of the network, and even to those elements that may not even be in the network yet. It must also be found at every point of data interaction, not just at the perimeters or to secure north-south traffic. This represents a fundamental change in how security must be approached. It’s no longer just about the placement of security in the different parts of the network. It goes far beyond that.
This is why security is recognized as one of the biggest obstacles to digital transformation today, and it is highlighting the limitations of current security implementations to IT leaders. The security point-solutions they’ve bolted onto their network over the years are simply no longer sufficient to address the new security challenges posed by the adoption of digital technologies and their attendant issues of elasticity, scalability, speed, and volume. Most importantly, that traditional approach doesn’t provide the proactive security platform they need to support the agility, automation, and orchestration they now require.
To meet these new demands, security must undergo the same degree of transformation that is impacting the network and even then business itself. This requires things like appropriate protections and inspections being automatically deployed at every data interaction point across all digital technologies; dynamic adaptability to secure networked environments that are constantly in a state of flux; the ability to see, share and correlate threat intelligence in order to detect and respond to threats in real time; and the ability to impose constant threat assessments across the entire organization.
To do this, organizations simply cannot continue adding independent and isolated devices and point product to resolve new problems, or address new network segments, such as cloud deployments, as separate security projects. Instead, securing today’s networks requires full control, visibility, and automation across the entire distributed network.
There are five major cybersecurity areas that are critical to address in order for organizations to successfully security their digital transformation efforts.
As the threat landscape continues to become more complex and more difficult to fight, it forces security to adapt to meet the demands of automation, agility, and analytics. To meet these new demands, not only do devices need to be able to work as a single, holistic system, but threat intelligence also needs to evolve and adapt quickly. Which is why the new generation of security solutions need to be able to leverage machine learning and AI for better visibility and greater automation in fighting the volume and sophistication of attacks targeting today’s networks.
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This byline originally appeared in CSO.