While many organisations have already embarked on their digital transformation journey with the pandemic marking a significant turning point, there is now a growing focus on the shift to a secure digital transformation. As many leaders were forced to rush through the process of moving organisations to the cloud, enabling remote work was the primary focus and the security implications were less of a priority.
Increasingly, however, many organisations are yet to acknowledge the importance of cybersecurity as a business imperative with many CISOs struggling to sell the additional benefits of a zero-trust architecture. For so long, businesses have pushed back on security initiatives for fear of hindering user experience. However, zero trust is an option that can improve this, all while providing the security needed to safeguard a modern enterprise.
Now more than ever, It is critical that organisation’s leaders understand why zero trust is more than just security, and instead a critical business imperative.
How to pitch to the CXO
CXOs often manage both employee and customer experience with the aim of ensuring positive interactions with and perceptions of the company. Giving employees more choice over how they work, simplifying their access to information, and improving technology performance are at the heart of maintaining positive employee experiences for a modern workforce. As organisations are being forced to consider the best tools to support these new imperatives, a zero-trust approach is increasingly being acknowledged as the most practical and all-encompassing solution.
Empowering workforces with the freedom to choose where they want to work and on what device is now a fundamental aspect of the employee experience. However, traditional security tactics hinder this freedom by making the route to access more complex and multifaceted. When organisations deploy zero-trust architectures, their hybrid workforces benefit from quick, painless, and reliable connections to their resources. When a workforce is protected without having to think about it, they can focus entirely on business goals and avoid the disruption of multiple passwords for multiple logins and issues with access in general.
For those running legacy security products that rely on VPNs and traditional edge firewalls, they face in complete security, inconsistent user access, an enlarged attack surface, and a poor user experience which makes the workforce less innovative, proactive, and engaged.
With limited resources, business leaders must decide whether to focus on lower-priority tasks for patching and lifecycle management or shift the focus to higher-priority aspects such as policy management and security response. In this sense, the choice of security architecture is essentially a trade-off problem that executives need to solve.
How to pitch the CIO
Ensuring an organisation’s ability to evolve with the market and its competitors is a critical business goal of the CIO. In this role, CIOs strive to continually revitalise how an organisation uses its technology, empowers its people, and improves its processes to drive new business models and new revenue streams. As technology has evolved from being perceived as a cost centre to being an enabler of business, for digital-first organisations it is the nerve centre. Secure digital transformation has fundamentally changed the way modern businesses operate.
Digital transformation isn’t new, but for many organisations the pandemic was the catalyst that accelerated adoption of digital processes and technology for serving customers and equipping employees to work from anywhere. But true secure digital transformation demands new ways of thinking about architecting and securing connectivity for people, apps, and data everywhere.
Employees are now on the internet more than the corporate network, accessing applications and data from everywhere. Sensitive business data has become more distributed, residing outside the corporate perimeter. Data protection needs to provide a secure connection to the data no matter where it or the user is. While the process of digital transformation improves business agility and information flow, it also dramatically expands the attack surface and exposes businesses to new threats. This means that traditional security architectures, which focus on protecting the network, are no longer effective in this new reality.
Zero trust can address the agenda around agile ways of working, increased flexibility, technology simplification and the removal of technical debt by moving to a platform approach in the cyber space. This enables key technology differentiation functions such as development opportunities, product management and achieving faster business outcomes.
How to pitch the CEO
For CEOs, setting the organisations overall strategy, executing the vision, and ensuring growth are paramount. Enabling the business shift into the digital world and thus retaining competitiveness is critical. The benefits brought by zero trust are a key pillar in making this happen.
Deploying a zero trust architecture enables key performance and risk indicators around managing operational risks. It also feeds into key control discussions around other critical areas including cyber insurance, reimagining telco products in the MSSP space, and bringing value around mergers, divestitures, and acquisitions in a more efficient manner.
Conclusion
There is an incredible opportunity for IT leaders to educate business decision-makers on zero trust and bring it to the table as a high-value business driver. It’s the missing link helping businesses empower and ready themselves for future technologies today.
While cybersecurity is a critical part of securing an organisations data and workforce, zero trust offers so much more that the C-suite can’t afford to miss.
