Business Leaders See Cybersecurity as a Critical Tool in This Digitized Era

Technology leaders need to find innovative ways to secure scattered workforces and cloud applications – in order to drive business enhancements and collaborations.

Enterprise leaders across different industry verticals who once considered cybersecurity as part of their traditional infrastructure are now rapidly investing in integrated and cloud-based approaches. This is being implemented along with ripple effects on distributed workforce security, innovation, and competitive advantages – reveals a recent Forcepoint and WSJ Intelligence study.

Even before the pandemic, the unbound enterprise started to materialize, with operations freed from the network or physical infrastructures. The increased requirement for digitalization accelerated this trend. Some of these changes made in 2020 were strategic, and the significant shift in awareness will have a far-reaching consequence.

Also Read: How the Global Digitalization Has Changed the Future of Cyber-Security

The enterprise technology leaders now consider cybersecurity as the key aspect of business advantage. Nearly 45% of the respondents stated they have greatly accelerated digital transformation plans as a result of the uncertain market, and about 48% reported cyber security’s improved role in enabling innovation. Even 41% of business leaders agreed that it delivers a competitive edge.

Nicolas Fischbach, CTO, and VP of SASE engineering at Forcepoint explain, “Industry leaders are emphatically pointing to a very different future for cybersecurity. When 90% of leaders believe the biggest challenge is securing anywhere workers and cloud services, it’s clear that infrastructure- or access-oriented security tools can no longer keep up with the needs of today’s unbound enterprise.”

The study also revealed how decentralized organizations will develop ahead – with almost 48% stating increasing their use of cloud-based security systems and another 58% recognized the need for a further integrated trust framework. About 90% of CEOs have already adopted SASE or evaluating SASE to adopt soon.

In fact, nearly 39% of the organizations have accelerated the zero trust architecture adoption. The cloud-driven converged strategies will offer improved advantages as remote workers will have more autonomy to drive business. However, this also indicates leaders need to find innovative ways to secure scattered workforces and cloud applications – to drive collaboration.

Also Read: Better Contingency Planning for Enterprise Cybersecurity

According to Elizabeth Nann, Executive Director at Wall Street Journal Intelligence, “The research showed that CISOs adapted existing strategy, while the pandemic has really opened the eyes and changed the views of CEOs. This suggests that teams now better understand the importance of an integrated security framework with the agility to adapt to a continuously evolving environment.”

Clearly, with more organizations operate their business in a world with apparently endless options, the IT security teams will need to evolve their roles as we advance. Moreover, CEOs, as well as CISOs, are bullish on SASE adoption – with almost 90% of CEOs and around 84% of CISOs saying they are on it.