The two biggest enablers in ICT are now Cloud and Security. This article seeks to explain why this is the case and then sets out a strategy for how enterprises can leverage Cloud and Security to rapidly move their agendas forward.
To “Move fast without breaking things” is more than a catch cry, it sums up what businesses seek to do better than their competitors. Moving fast today is a matter of survival for many businesses. Business landscapes change quickly and to keep up with changing customer requirements demands that successful businesses are the first to deliver against new customer expectations. First to market provides businesses with important benefits in todays economy, particularly the ability to establish significant market share for new products or services brought to market.
What are the ingredients required to be a first mover. Being able to change software and technology to reflect new processes being brought to market is key to being able to bring new products are services to market today. In most industries the ability to access new customers in dependent on making rapid changes to websites to inform mass markets of new products available for purchase. Many products and services in tern are dependent on or consist of technology components which must be able to be envisioned, designed, developed, and delivered to the market.
What role do Cloud and Security have in providing solutions to support first to market capabilities. Modern businesses are moving to the cloud in order to consume IT assets and resources that have the ability to be configured and spun up for use much more rapidly that conventional on premise IT assets and resources. Large cloud vendors have invested substantial resources in refining and simplifying their market offerings in order to be able to dial up new capacity. In the past adding new capacity could have long lead times associated with purchasing new assets and installing them into in-house data centres. In this model of ICT delivery security and services are separately designed and delivered by different groups of subject matter experts.
ISG are bringing to market end to end cloud solutions that incorporate security as an integral component of services consumed by business so that businesses can have confidence that new cloud resources are added within a known framework where security has been planned and built into to the ICT solution. Often smaller and medium sized businesses purchase and consume ICT resources in an adhoc way in the form of file storage, SaaS applications, virtual devices, and physical end point devices. Some of these resources are public cloud, some are on-premise, and some are SaaS based solutions where the ICT solutions are managed by third party application providers. The risk in this approach is that businesses end up with a patch work quilt of protections which are not consistent and in the end inadequate to provide protection. Threats like Ransomware attacks and exfiltration of private data for sale on the dark web can have a devastating impact on your business. A crack in your protection armour can allow an attacker in.
ISG have a security heritage based around providing secure frameworks, policies, designs and architectures to critical infrastructure businesses in Australia and across Asia Pacific. We bring framework thinking to solving problems with business and management of technology. While we continue to consult to large enterprises, especially in the critical infrastructure industry, we are aware that there are several vulnerable sectors of the economy where a consulting approach is not a practical approach to providing protection. While critical infrastructure industries are complex and solutions need to be designed to pit the purpose, in many other industries more standard solutions will provide high levels of protection. Examples are schools, many businesses, and medical practices.
ISG have sought to address this problem by selecting best of breed providers and incorporate prequalified components that meet security standards. The solution is know as SafeNet and there are solutions for business, healthcare, and schools. These are known as SafeNet for Business, SafeNet for Health, and SafeNet for Schools. The website is www.safenet.technology and outlines out solution for helping enterprises stay secure. We are still actively involved in consulting with complex businesses as well as designing and delivering secure solutions for large enterprises but now you can benefit from our experience by leveraging these solutions into your business. If you need help or advice we are just a phone call away.
In this way we are able to assist businesses to deliver solutions to clients that they can rely on to be secure and support their needs to rapidly deliver new applications and solutions for their customers.
