Intelligent CISO Issue 16 | Page 41

E R T N P X E INIO OP Innovation without security misses the mark As more businesses and organisations progress their digitalisation strategies, it’s crucial that security is at the core of every decision. Amrit Williams, VP Products, Skybox Security, tells us why security should be built into innovation to ensure organisations can effectively reap the benefits of Digital Transformation. I nnovation is the lifeblood of business today. Organisations need to constantly innovate to enter new markets and provide new services – and do it better, and faster than their competition. ignoring advice and shirking policy. In the case of cloud migrations, operations teams often didn’t involve the security group at all, then decided a specialised security group was needed and finally arrived at the conclusion that cloud was a part of the infrastructure all along and the traditional security team should oversee these networks as well. Digital Transformation, where technology is applied in creative ways to traditional problems, has aided the speed, agility and cost-effectiveness of innovation projects. However, it has more often than not pushed security to the sidelines. This lack of strategy to cloud migrations proved short-sighted and costly. It also could have opened organisations up to new cyber-risks, damaging attacks and regulatory violations. Historically, the dichotomy between security and innovation has meant that if you want to move fast, you could get hurt; if you want to be secure, you’ll hardly move at all. As a result, innovation has regularly bypassed security teams, www.intelligentciso.com | Issue 16 But a lesson should be learned from these mistakes. Innovation will happen regardless of security’s involvement, but security is a critical element to the success of the initiative. Security should play an active Amrit Williams, VP Products, Skybox Security role in innovation strategy and execution, advising on how best to achieve goals while minimising risk. An era of tectonic change Despite the newness of dynamic computing technology, in 2018, 77% of enterprises reported having at least one application or some portion of their enterprise computing infrastructure in the cloud. This means the network infrastructures on which enterprises are built have changed dramatically in a short period of time. In addition to cloud adoption, other changes have contributed a network complexity unimaginable even just a decade ago. A global economy has made internationally dispersed, mobile workforces and outsourcing commonplace, creating countless 41