Cloud adoption has picked up significantly in recent years as businesses across South Africa accelerate their digital transformation goals.
While this holds a myriad opportunities down the line, it comes at the cost of cybersecurity, which is often a lesser considered element as the push to digitally transform overshadows any vulnerabilities that may crop up.
In order to better handle the ever changing threat landscape, Trellix‘s chief revenue officer, Adam Philpott, is of the opinion that businesses need to be leveraging machine learning in order to make for any gaps not covered by a human being.
“South Africa and Africa may have lagged other countries in commencing digitisation, but the region has certainly caught up with its counterparts elsewhere in the world,” he highlights.
“The adoption of Cloud-based services and remote working have accelerated significantly in the last couple of years, and the pace of this adoption continues to accelerate, despite there being insufficient skills sources to implement new projects, and maintain and protect them in the future,” adds Philpott.
Given the scope and frequency with which data breaches are announced (not counting the ones that remain under wraps from the public), no organisation can afford to put cybersecurity on the back burner.
The Trellix (a recent merger between McAfee Enterprise and FireEye) executive also notes that companies should not fall into the hole of acquiring cybersecurity protections as soon as they hit the market or simply react only when a problem arises.
“Protection from the cyberthreats of the future, despite skills shortages, is possible with XDR architecture that keeps learning, so that you stay protected,” Philpott explains.
“Global threat monitoring prioritises risks and proactively addresses vulnerabilities, while local vector telemetry surfaces insights from Trellix’s end to end native footprint, and from our vast open network of API partners. This means that we can detect and counteract threats before they even taken hold,” he espouses regarding the company’s capabilities.
He continues that savvy businesses should be looking to adopt cybersecurity protection that is predictive in nature and that is where machine learning can play a significant role in future.
“Cyber security should work as an organism that evolves and grows with your business, as a ‘living security’ that offers threat resiliency through its wide network of interconnected threat sensors and capabilities,” he points out.
“It should help you adapt, so that your business stays agile, with an automated orchestration playbook that responds to active threats, and a dynamic recalibration of prevention policies, at scale. Cybersecurity is no longer about prevention, detection, and response – all three need to be integrated into a remediation approach,” Philpott concludes.
If businesses wish to take cybersecurity as seriously as they do their digital transformation objectives, Trellix says they need to be utilising a mix of data science, algorithms and automation to improves the productivity of security operations centres. This in turn affords greater control and should deliver comprehensive threat contexts.
[Image – Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash]
