Low-Tech Collaboration Emerges as The Key to Protecting Complex Enterprise Infrastructure Environments

The complexity of today’s enterprise infrastructure environment has created demand for a great variety of dedicated point security solutions, triggering a disconcerting array of alarms and alerts that most organizations struggle to address with current access to talent and staff. While implementing effective strategies that harness automation and security technology remain critical, the most successful organizations tackle complex security challenges by involving different organizational disciplines in the risk-management problem statement.

These were among the conclusions of a CIO.com virtual roundtable that featured over a dozen enterprise technology executives from the financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, and logistics sectors.

When it comes to addressing enterprise technology complexity, organizations appear resigned to the fact that they must prepare their organization to protect and defend assets scattered across on-prem and a variety of cloud resources for the foreseeable future. That said, many of the participants pointed out the need to develop a common enterprise-wide “cloud-native” approach to managing and securing their heterogeneous environments. It represents the latest evidence of a break with the conventional wisdom of the recent past, in which technology modernization was closely — if not exclusively — correlated with cloud migration.

Several participants pointed out that if workloads are to remain on-premises, they cannot continue to exist in a “naked legacy state” indefinitely. These assets must either be: 1) “modernized” to platforms that enable secure integration across the enterprise-wide data and application fabric; or 2) cocooned and then connected to the rest of the “cloud-native” hybrid infrastructure with APIs and/or containerized microservices. 

Roundtable participants reported that the talent challenge and skills gap continues to challenge CISOs and CIOs alike. One way to address this issue is to broaden corporate participation in security initiatives by getting other corporate disciplines — finance, operations, IT, etc. — involved in the risk management process.

This objective can be accomplished by inviting broader segments of the corporate community to security tabletop exercises. Several pointed out how well-attended sessions held regularly throughout the year can bring joint clarity to risk and security factors. These exercises help organizations hone their resilience strategies while providing a constructive basis for discussing priorities and defining what their minimal viable business (MVB) looks like.