The digital landscape drastically changed as organizations moved workers from inside their corporate networks to their homes and into the cloud. Unfortunately, malicious actors quickly learned to take advantage of the new environments, and cybersecurity incidents increased dramatically. And, it’s not just the number of incidents that has increased in this new normal, but also the financial impact to businesses. Moving to remote work has increased the average cost of a data breach by $137,000 USD.
Other factors
In addition to the accelerating velocity of attacks, the looming spectre of strict legislation means that traditional security approaches may no longer be suitable. Statistics indicate that cybercrime poses an existential threat to businesses not adequately prepared.
Companies entrust their CIOs to protect their data assets from unauthorized parties and manage evolving compliance requirements. Unfortunately, the speed at which threats are changing and the complexity required to mitigate risks, pose significant challenges for resource-constrained IT departments.
The Discussion
With these principles in mind, in partnership with the IT Media Group, we brought together 12 cross-industry IT executives for a virtual roundtable entitled ‘Cybersecurity Essentials for the New Normal.’ The session provided an opportunity to focus on the top cybersecurity issues that organizations face.
Moderating the roundtable was Jeff Ishii, Chief Technologist at The IT Media Group. Also in attendance from the ActZero side was, Chief Operating Officer, Chris Finan, and Mid-Market Executive, Daniel West.
The interactive session included a combination of live-polling and panel discussion about the challenges and best practices for the following topic areas:
You can hear more from the group in the session highlights reel below:
Participant Reaction
Following the roundtable, Chris commented, “It was fascinating to hear how executives were dealing with the emerging threats. To solve these problems, organizations need to clearly understand the risks, do the fundamentals better than the adversaries, and develop playbooks to be able to mitigate those risks when they occur.” He added, “Teams are still struggling to find the right signals in all of the noise. With our investments in artificial intelligence and human analysis, we provide a seamless interface that reflects an organization’s context, focuses on the risks that really matter, and addresses their overall compliance strategy.” Watch Chris’ recap of the roundtable here to see the rest of his key takeaways from the session:
Dan observed, “It was exciting to listen to the IT executives talk about continuous improvement, risk management, and how they are trying to find the right people, processes, and partners. Security really is top of mind for every organization.” When asked how companies can solve their challenges, Dan added, “Leaders need to think of cybersecurity as an ever-changing landscape. We apply our broad experience by helping companies to assess their maturity against a number of frameworks and provide them with advice on how to improve their security posture.” You can what else Dan thought were the most valuable learnings’ from the roundtable at his recap video below:
Ultimately, this roundtable surfaced multiple relevant factors for mid-sized enterprises dealing with ongoing WFH environments, and security considerations thereof. To see whether your own security plans are addressing other unique WFH threats, review our white paper “Tackling Threats in a Newly Distributed Workforce.” Or, if you are considering the security requirements of shifting from one to the other, feel free to check out our white paper on “Addressing the Remain Remote or Return to Office Question.”