Addressing Security Risks Inherent to Digital Transformation

Enterprises are advancing in their pursuit of digital transformation strategies, looking for ways to boost power while reducing costs around mission-critical business processes through cloud-based technologies. Security teams face new challenges as they enable the organization to share data across the enterprise while taking steps to ensure a zero-trust environment and a unified security approach.

Digital transformation obstacles are leading to increased containerization and modulating of refactored apps. This often means a move to an array of software as a service (SaaS) solutions for everything from email to collaboration. In addition, digital transformation generally means a move to shared data across all departments and employees, as well as outside business partners. Further complicating the environment, enterprises are using artificial intelligence tools and analytics that enable them to implement a hybrid multicloud solution in an effort to optimize each workload to the right cloud platform.

A digital transformation comes with measurable potential for reducing costs and disruptive advances in agility and productivity, but it all rests on one, often downplayed, underappreciated aspect of advancing technology: data security.

Finding a Balance: Security teams are forced to find the balance between enabling technology advances and prioritizing the right security policies. In some cases, this causes the security teams to become more siloed. This is particularly true when distinct security teams operating within a particular department begin to collect processes and tools specific to that department. They develop policies and create tools that address department issues.

This leaves security leaders with disconnection across the organization and a high level of complexity. As digital transformation progresses, teams become increasingly siloed as data environments change and new security-use cases appear. This means that security teams, tools, and processes, developed in silos are no longer scalable, creating new pressure for a chief information officer (CIO) to unify security in a holistic approach.

Preparing Security for Digital Transformation: As companies embrace more complex environments, such as hybrid multicloud, security must address the sprawl of data. Security cannot address emerging concerns around data and systems with traditional security management. Data must be secure, resilient, and compliant, so teams need to address the following areas:

• Identify where the data is stored and how it is accessed.
• Monitor for anomalies in data access, using control policies that limit risk.
• Proactively address any threats or breaches to limit damage while promoting business continuity.

No enterprise wants to halt their digital transformation efforts because of security concerns. The alternative is a security strategy that is comprehensive and removes siloes. The most effective plan is one that prioritizes business outcomes balanced with a certain level of risk. A plan that utilizes zero-trust security practices must also be centralized so that teams can apply data security and compliance policy across the organization. 

Security teams must also be able to share relevant information across their teams, such as identity and access management, that allows for coordination of risk investigation, mitigation, and remediation strategies.

Before your digital transformation plan takes off, prioritize a security approach that equips your organization for success. Contact us at Clarksys for more information about security tools that promote cross-functional data sharing across on-premise, private, and public cloud environments.