Kathy Gibson is at Gartner Symposium in Cape Town – Digital and workforce transformation are underpinned by IT and security transformation.
Many of the trends we are seeing are driven by a massive increase in data, says Servaas Venter, director: data protection solutions at Dell EMC.
The risk profile has also changed, as companies become more exposed in the world of IoT, cloud and bog data.
IT budgets are being used in areas that are outside the ambit of the CIO, and many companies today believe their data is not being adequately protected.
Venter says organisations have to consider protection at the end point, at the network, in operation and on recovery.
The wealth of threats out there are driving a new focus on endpoint security.
But there is still a blind spot when it comes to unstructured data, Venter explains, although it accounts for more than 80% of the data in an organisation – and, increasingly, this is what is being targeted.
Meanwhile only 50% of anti-virus products are effective at securing the endpoint, and 71% of companies have suffered a breach.
“You must have secure root of trust; and you must protect your end user,” Venter explains.
Dell EMC secures data on the device, at rest, in motion and during recovery and control.
Helping to secure data while it’s on the network, RSA NetWitness is a network tool that lets administrators discover what’s happening on the network, analyse and respond to it.
Importantly, it does everything in realtime, using machine learning.
Operational recovery is an important step in the security lifecycle. “We all know that companies are being targeted – and at some stage, you may have to recover from an attack,” Venter says.
When it comes to the point, traditional backup may not be good enough. “For cyber-resilience you need to adopt a layered approach,” he says.
This is addressed with data protection best practice, hardening and advanced features, as offered by Dell EMC cyber-recovery.
Gartner research tells us that ransomware attacks numbered between 2-million and 3-million in 2018 – and are set to double every year through to 2019.
Addressing this threat is about more than security products: companies need to ensure good governance and insight so that can understand and quantify their exposure.
To assist organisations, the RSA Archer IT and security risk management tool offers deep insights in the environment, so CIOs can quantify the risk in financial terms.