The unforeseen global health crisis of 2020 has driven radical changes in most organizations.
With empty offices and business pressure building, enterprises are forced to rapidly adapt to new working environments. Almost all non-essential employees are now working remotely, and this trend is likely to continue.
Technology is holding today’s distributed organizations together. But a fractured foundation has created gaps in security, performance, and operations.
How do security and IT organizations address these gaps? And how can security and IT leaders prepare for a future of work in a post-pandemic era?
Sanjay Poonen, Chief Operating Officer at VMware, set a goal this year to speak with over 1,000 CISOs and CIOs. In the first segment of our latest webinar “The Future of Remote Work: Connecting Security and IT” he sat down with Tom Corn, SVP Security Business Unit at VMware, to share insights on the importance of a unified approach to security and IT management.
Discussion highlights include:
What the new normal means for IT and Security customers
Trust goes alongside security. Both CIOs and CISOs have a deep desire to build a trusted relationship with companies that can help them solve their problems at scale.
There is also a tremendous amount of frustration from CISOs. As Sanjay points out, “one CISO from a fortune 500 company had 125 security tools! And it was getting to be cumbersome in terms of the labor, cost, number of agents, alerts, and consoles involved.” A strong proposition would be to reduce that in some thoughtful way (not just vendor consolidation) and consider integrating like Zero Trust.
Intrinsic security is a much bigger part of our infrastructure
More people are finding cloud security solutions quite attractive during a time where everyone is working remotely. But there are still many organizations with a big reliance on private cloud and on-premise security and IT infrastructure.
Fortunately, VMware solutions can bridge the gap between the two.
There are 20 areas of enterprise security that businesses could focus on and between them, there are thousands of vendors. At VMware Carbon Black, we focus on four areas that we can excel at: Endpoint, Network, Cloud, and Workload.
Cloud security is definitely the top consideration. One aspect of it is managing the cost and security with everything that occurs. In this dichotomy of public cloud and private cloud, we’re able to secure workloads—anything from virtualized software in VMware, a container that’s running on-prem, or a virtual machine running inside AWS.
SOC becomes a virtual place
Providing SOC team virtual technology (such as virtual desktops, Horizon, etc.) is an important aspect of their daily working life. But to the extension of the tools that they use — whether it’s networking technologies, endpoint, or cloud — they get the benefit of deploying them in a much easier, faster way.
Consider new employees that started during the pandemic. They receive their laptop via mail, and they have to get onboarded within 10-15 minutes because they don’t have all the time for an IT person to come to them. Fortunately, at VMware Carbon Black, we are actually able to do that very quickly through WorkspaceONE. We deploy all the appropriate security technologies, whether it’s Carbon Black Cloud for endpoint security, network acceleration, on that same laptop. Traditional hardware approaches don’t work with this. Organizations have to rethink this from scratch and at VMware Carbon Black, we are in an advantageous position to do that.
A unified approach to security and IT management
There has been a 238 percent increase in attacks in tandem with the new cycle, and ransomware attacks have increased by 900 percent over the last several months since the pandemic. There has also been a huge increase in island-hopping, moving from suppliers into organizations.
Now is the time for a unified approach to security and IT management.
Sanjay Poonen tackles this topic by providing a transparent view of VMware’s security structure. At VMware, CISO reports to CIO, but at other companies, there is usually a chasm between the CISO and the CTO who owns the technology. In some cases, they merge into one function and call it Chief Technology and Security Officer.
Sanjay emphasizes this point by saying that this collaboration is “good for us because it allows technology, networking, and security to come closer together. The connection of endpoint and network security, EDR meets NDR.”
VMware Carbon Black has great relationships with all the C-levels (CIO, CTO, end-user computing team), except the CISO. The most successful CISOs have built very strong partnerships—one side with people who own end-user computing, and on the other side, with the technology infrastructure that goes way down in the data center.
Now that VMware utilizes NSX and Carbon Black at scale, hundreds and thousands of CISOs are beginning to recognize the organization as the security vendor that has a great likelihood of being the leader in the cybersecurity space. This is due to various events, including the fading away of legacy players that are not innovating anymore, which has provided the perfect opportunity for disruptive players like Carbon Black, with a new vision that’s Zero Trust, and intrinsic to your infrastructure.
You can watch the full webinar “The Future of Remote Work: Connecting Security and IT” on-demand, where our top security experts discuss the risk and rewards of a remote workforce and shed light on the latest threat vectors targeting remote workers.
—————-
Interested to learn more? Download our most recent eBook today to learn how VMware Carbon Black Cloud helps unify security across all control points in an organization: endpoints, workloads, clouds, networks, and identity systems.
