VIEWPOINT
A MATTER OF TRUST VIBIN SHAJU, PRESALES DIRECTOR, EMEA ENTERPRISE, MCAFEE, SAYS THE ZERO TRUST SECURITY MODEL IS A MUST-HAVE FOR THE NEW NORMAL HYBRID WORLD.
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rior to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the business case for cloud computing had been convincingly established. Business agility, control over IT costs and significant reductions in complexity were all there for the taking. All that remained was for forward-thinking stakeholders to take the plunge. Some of the last hurdles to be cleared in winning over die-hard doubters were compliance issues — particularly those imposed by regional governments on the issue of data residency. AWS, Microsoft and Oracle all established cloud data centres in the GCC region before the pandemic, in part to address data residency concerns across the Middle East. 12
CXO INSIGHT ME
APRIL 2021
Then COVID put public and private organisations across the region on the back foot. Before long, however, enterprises dusted themselves off and headed for the cloud, not for the convincing business case, but out of necessity. Industry pundits spent the next few months revising cloudspend projections upwards. Mid-2020 predictions from IDC, for example, foresaw Middle East Turkey and Africa (META) cloud investment hit US$6.5 billion by 2024. The other shoe… Amid this mass migration, an unwelcome — but not altogether unforeseeable — by-product reared its ugly head. Digital opportunists, driven by the perceived unpreparedness of cloud migrators, took
advantage of new vulnerabilities, and struck. The UAE alone faced a 250% increase in cyberattacks in 2020, and the government’s own head of cybersecurity attributed much of the surge to WFH conditions. IT teams had delivered on productivity, employee satisfaction and business agility, but failed to account for the hunger and effectiveness of bad actors. It is an unfortunate fact of cloud life that hybrid architectures that require sensitive data to cross several corporate boundaries make for tempting targets. In addition, those working from home do so on devices that may not be sufficiently updated to account for software vulnerabilities. The convenience of quick delivery was impossible to refuse. Being able
