CIOs need a broad outlook for developing security strategies

The last few months have seen numerous phishing attacks and hacking on to corporate networks—are you seeing the threat landscape getting more complicated?

The security industry is rightly earning its long due importance in organizations owing to numerous attacks last year. The threat landscape is becoming more volatile and any industry vertical connected to the Internet stands at a risk. Companies need to evaluate their current security technologies and assess its flaws and gaps.

With the trend of BYOD taking root in the corporate environment, cyber criminals are seeing mobile apps as a way of gaining access to critical information. CIOs should now look at investments in secure infrastructure to address the challenges that trends like BYOD, IoT, and mobility have and create a framework that covers all the areas. With an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape, the key to ensure security is by ensuring that the solutions don’t stagnate when the risks multiply and keep evolving with time.

Given the grim realities how can enterprises evolve a security strategy that is in sync with the times?

As organizations are moving workloads on cloud, security threats have become more complex. CIOs need to have a broad outlook towards developing new security strategies and moving away from traditional ways. Also, technology does not alone combat cyber threats. Along with investing large amounts on security products and services, companies need to invest in innovations focussed on training employees about protecting customer and colleague information and have a strong back end system to keep a check.

If you look at the market, are solutions available right now can pro-actively address the concerns?

When it comes to data breaches, employees are the biggest threat to a company’s security. Most employees may have the best intention to remain secure but they still make common mistakes because they are unaware of the security risks. Organizations now need to invest more in the employee training because security is everyone’s responsibility not just the security team.

What do you except from security vendors in 2015?

In the wake of high-profile corporate and personal data hacks, consumers are rightfully worried that their increasingly connected lives make them vulnerable, and that concern is moving from computers to phones to cars to, well, everything. In 2015, security vendors should concentrate on solutions that can provide full contextual awareness of users, mobile devices and apps and provide users with dashboards and comprehensive reports of discovered hosts, suspect applications, threats, and indicators of compromise for widespread visibility. We also foresee increased collaboration among cyber security vendors as an accelerating trend that will help the industry combat the villains.