THE ZERO TRUST SECURITY MODEL – A MUST-HAVE FOR THE NEW NORMAL HYBRID WORLD
Vibin Shaju , Presales Director , EMEA Enterprise , McAfee , tells us how a Zero Trust model can create a strong foundation for holistic security and why it is required , particularly as the Coronavirus pandemic caused a surge in the number of data breaches .
rior to the emergence
P of the COVID-19 pandemic , the business case for cloud computing had been convincingly established . Business agility , control over IT costs and significant reductions in complexity were all there for the taking . All that remained was for forwardthinking stakeholders to take the plunge .
Some of the last hurdles to be cleared in winning over die-hard doubters were
Vibin Shaju , Presales Director , EMEA Enterprise , McAfee compliance issues – particularly those imposed by regional governments on the issue of data residency . AWS , Microsoft and Oracle all established cloud data centres in the GCC region before the pandemic , in part to address data residency concerns across the Middle East .
Then COVID put public and private organisations across the region on the back foot . Before long , however , enterprises dusted themselves off and headed for the cloud , not for the convincing business case , but out of necessity . Industry pundits spent the next few months revising cloud-spend projections upwards .
Mid-2020 predictions from IDC , for example , foresaw Middle East , Turkey and Africa ( META ) cloud investment hit US $ 6.5 billion by 2024 .
The other shoe . . .
Amid this mass migration , an unwelcome – but not altogether unforeseeable – by-product reared its ugly head . Digital opportunists , driven by the perceived unpreparedness of cloud migrators , took advantage of new vulnerabilities ,
In the cloud-first universe , Zero Trust can reduce threat levels while enhancing compliance .
and struck . The UAE alone faced a 250 % increase in cyberattacks in 2020 and the government ’ s own Head of Cybersecurity attributed much of the surge to WFH conditions .
IT teams had delivered on productivity , employee satisfaction and business agility , but failed to account for the hunger and effectiveness of bad actors . It is an unfortunate fact of cloud life that hybrid architectures that require sensitive data to cross several corporate boundaries make for tempting targets . In addition , those working from home do so on devices that may not be sufficiently updated to account for software vulnerabilities .
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