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What does the future of work really look like? Unlock the full potential of cloud-based solutions.

Where the first initial lockdown, back in March last year had forced most companies into an abrupt digital setting, the two that have since followed only solidified this. This transformation has now manifested itself so that companies have become significantly, if not completely, reliant on remote, digital solutions to remain functional. As a result, the growing need for robust remote working solutions has surged, causing traditional and antiquated workplace solutions to fall by the wayside.

Embracing digital transformation and unified workplaces

The evolution of digital transformation has fast-tracked the online revolution, meaning elaborate predictions of future working are now not so distant. The boundaries between working from home and in the office are now completely blurred as we find ourselves marching through 2021. The need for physical office space now seems redundant as we can work just as we did before, if not better, from home and exceed productivity and collaboration standards.

A far stronger focus is now on the availability of IT tools as workforces rely on these methods of remote solutions to remain as collaborative with their colleagues as possible. For example, proprietary business communication platforms have completely revolutionised the way we communicate, collaborate and generally work as they dealt with the majority of the population pivoting to remote working. State of the art interactive, virtual meetings via a browser promotes efficient collaboration and strengthens the performance of organizations, while necessary commutes can be reduced or in some cases avoided.

What’s more, the capabilities to provide quality engagement between employer and employees is now of utmost priority. As we navigate a more digitized year than ever before, employees should be equipped with most efficient solutions that IT managers can source within minutes, instead of days or even weeks so that effective communication internally can also benefit.

This ‘future of working’ model can be achieved through introducing personalized digital workspaces accessed through a browser of any device, anywhere in the world. Perfectly suited to the new home and office split, innovative cloud technology enables organizations and their staff to access any of their applications hosted on-premise or in the cloud, as well as internal and external web applications instantly.

Understanding the challenges

The sudden pivot to mass remote working, however, has not been as smooth sailing as initially thought after all. For companies still operating in traditional virtual environments, remote working solutions often lack flexibility to include legacy or GPU intensive applications that are traditionally running on a desktop or on-premise solutions. Though, it is not too late to innovate and take the first step towards cloud-based technologies. It cannot be stressed enough that cloud computing is here to stay and can offer these types of businesses a life line before it’s too late and fall completely behind digital transformations and breakthroughs.

Additionally, let us not forget that the internet is no doubt a dangerous place. A world now mostly operating online, puts the traditional-based IT infused companies, even more at risk. In fact, there are several emerging cyber threats with an impact that have never been seen before. Due to existing Enterprise software protection solutions that are decades old and vulnerable, many businesses are left exposed and ‘easy’ to attack. And now, with the entire UK workforce being told to work from home, where possible, investing in secure and reliable solutions has never been so crucial for the online safety of not only a business, but its workforce.

Companies can look for intelligent cloud-based solutions that combine the benefits of streaming an online workplace effortlessly with complete trust in the solution to resolve exposure to hackers. For example, when using the cloud, client-to-site VPN connections are no longer required as a result of migrating systems to the cloud, meaning there is no point of attack for trojans. Furthermore, no end device within an organization will be able to access an application server as the direct communication between the user and the target system can be completely ruled out with cloud software.

Yet, it is all types and sizes that can be affected. Even multinational companies fall victim to cyber hacks, often involving over 1000 employees due to vulnerabilities in outdated architecture. Investing in state-of-the-art cloud solutions that include cyber insurance will become a new box to add to the IT checklist in 2021 and beyond.

What’s more, new cloud technologies have emerged and seen acceleration in adoption, thanks to the influx of home working such as Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS). This type of solution enables all IT services to be offered in the cloud for workforces as they work remotely. XaaS not only provides remote workers with advanced flexibility but ensures enhanced security due to it encompassing the likes of other solutions such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

How cloud can help create the ‘anywhere office’ for the millennial workforce

Implementing an efficient cloud adoption strategy

If the multiple lockdowns have taught us one thing, it is that cloud adoption is no doubt proving to be one of the most efficient ways to secure and sustain the demands of a digital workforce. Now in 2021, we hope to reach some kind of normality as the dust will hopefully settle on the Covid-19 pandemic. Remote working is now here to stay and it will be up to business leaders to make sure they have the correct and most efficient cloud adoption strategy in place, for their employees. Armed with the right cloud solutions, businesses have the potential to simplify their IT ecosystems and procure solutions without committing to large upfront investments.

As businesses of the future evolve to be more digital and more shared, the need to prepare to avert a cyber pandemic – with potential even more than the coronavirus to upend our lives – has never been more urgent.

We need to strengthen our strategic response to the risks before we invest in tactics. Our plans must work harder and smarter to address capability gaps.

A common agenda will build the confidence and competence to achieve the resilience we need.

If humanity ever needed reminding of our interdependence, the pandemic has brought that home. As we scale up our response to the crisis, through largely digital means, our interconnectedness grows exponentially. And with it our vulnerability to the risk exposures of the virtual world. In fact, businesses of the future are evolving to be more digital and more shared. The need to prepare to avert a cyber pandemic – with potential even more than the coronavirus to upend our lives – has never been more urgent.

For a moment, let’s think of the unthinkable. A world without phones and internet, with idling trucks, trains and planes because fuel pumps and charging stations are incapacitated; banks shuttered; food supply chains broken; and emergency services made all but unavailable. This bleak vision would be inevitable if electricity supplies are cut off by a cyberattack.

In a scenario such as this, we know, that the ensuing swift blackout would be crippling. Unfortunately, we also know that a crisis of this scope, sophistication and impact is not just possible but something we are currently dealing with – albeit in a different context.

Global Technology Governance Report 2021

Last month, a group, believed to be Russian, gained access to over 18,000 systems – belonging to government and corporations – through a compromised update to SolarWinds’ Orion software. We were unprepared to prevent the attack because the bad actors slipped through the exact whitelisted software supply chain we trust. Even more regrettably, the software supply chain allowed them to access the network of FireEye – the US-based cybersecurity giant known for investigating and remedying some of the world’s most high-profile breaches.

While FireEye’s customers remained largely unimpacted this time, the moral of the story is that no one and nothing is immune. Our sources of cyber-protection – software updates or defending partners – can be the Trojan Horse where everything around us devolves into chaos.

Well before we learnt these tough lessons in the final weeks of a rather challenging 2020, the World Economic Forum questioned whether our individual and collective approach to managing cyber risks is sustainable in the face of the major technology trends taking place.

Although there’s an array of resources to manage cyberattacks, we still have a long way to go before we can, as a whole, effectively counter these threats. We need to strengthen our strategic response to the risks before we invest in tactics. Our plans must work harder and smarter to address capability gaps in three areas:

1. More coordination

Consider the SolarWinds attack. It did not directly hit its intended targets. Instead, the attackers surreptitiously built a chain of offence, that included non-government agencies, security and technology firms along with educational institutions, to inch unnoticed towards their real targets for espionage.

They knew they’d find their mark through our digital interconnectedness. We can turn this same intertwining of infrastructure to our advantage. Research tells us that hackers attack computers with Internet access—every 39 seconds on average. If we all shared threat intelligence, across borders, across the private and public sector, across industries and competitors, the collective intelligence could only move us forward faster.

An invaluable first step would be to develop more open systems, while adopting common standards and taxonomy in cybersecurity. This will serve us better to integrate and train our teams to drive holistic security. Global spending on cybersecurity solutions is projected to exceed $1 trillion cumulatively over the five-year period from 2017 to 2021. We must reprioritize these budgets to align with shared goals including collaborating to overpower organized cybercrime and the private-sector technology nexus with nation-state attackers.

2. More sophistication

The Global Risks Report 2020, articulated how the digital nature of the Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies is making our landscapes vulnerable to cyberattacks. For example, it is estimated that there are already over 21 billion IoT devices worldwide, slated to double by 2025. Attacks on IoT devices increased by more than 300% in the first half of 2019 alone.

The report, observes how “using ‘security-by-design’ principles to integrate cybersecurity features into new products continues to be secondary to getting products quickly out into the market.” Our current approach of bolt-on security needs to be reimagined to create stronger build-in standards, including SDLC-security quality certification, that makes software partners more accountable for security assurance. Along with this discipline in securing the supply chain as meticulously as we secure our products, we need better design architecture to tackle the challenges at hand.

3. More human capital

At the same pace that AI is growing useful in cyber defence, it is also enabling cybercriminals to use deep learning to breach security systems and harness data sets to improve response to defence.

While we can battle machine with machine, nurturing a strong pipeline cybersecurity talent, will give our defence an edge. We need better problem finders in greater numbers to work with our problem-solving machines. And this time, they need to be embedded in the complete lifecycle of our processes. Every person in the ecosystem must understand his or her role with respect to cybersecurity and be accountable to deliver to metrics and standards for cybersecurity quality. As of 2019, there were an estimated 2.8 million cybersecurity professionals worldwide, against a need for over 4 million.

If there is one lesson from dealing with the pandemic, it is the need to take each other along as we move forward into a more secure future. The very nature of a pandemic is such that no one is really safe unless everyone is safe. A cyber pandemic is no different. It is in shared trust and a common agenda that we can build the confidence and competence to achieve the resilience we need.

During 2020, institutions of all kinds were forced to adapt to a dynamic world where the usual projections and five-year marketing plans did not apply. Economic reports show marked GDP reductions of greater than 20 per cent in many countries, with a continued decline into 2021. Businesses and workplaces will increasingly turn to models of work in dynamic fields – such as cybersecurity – to make them more resilient.

Organisations that emerge out of the pandemic and the ensuing economic turmoil will have spent 2020 continually adapting to previously unimagined circumstances. This is a very familiar environment for people working in security, and particularly cybersecurity because quite often we don’t know what the next couple of hours will look like. Businesses of all kinds will discover the need to adopt fluid models and frameworks developed in a dynamic field and use them to redirect money, personnel and resources rapidly.

Typically, most businesses rely on static, predictive data analysis for growth and sustainability. The study insights and information from the previous few weeks and base predictions on them. However, these statistics can be rendered virtually useless within the next hour. Instead, businesses must start using data as they get it, proactively seeking out problems that could pose danger – just as cybersecurity specialists do.

Many cybersecurity frameworks can be modified to suit businesses more broadly. One example is data orchestration – where information that has been siloed in various parts of an organisation is collated and made available for rapid analysis.

Another is the concept of common vulnerability exposures (CVEs). This is a standardised identifier for known vulnerabilities, such as a weakness in a certain kind of encryption or exposure such as a large data breach in the last two years. Lists of these are available for any organisation looking to improve its cybersecurity. A version of this approach for other industries – known issues with certain suppliers, for example – could be used to make all kinds of firms more resilient.

In cybersecurity, we often take a three-pronged approach: detect what the potential threat is; take immediate action to protect information; and establish long-term defences to systems, such as new kinds of encryption. Businesses will find that adopting these processes and tools – especially their emphasis on the early detection of potential threats and the sharing of information when necessary – will help future-proof operations.

Early adopters will be the winners here. Workplaces and organisations that embrace the reality of a dynamic environment, rather than yearning for static working and legacy business models, will outperform their competitors. In 2021, companies and institutions that adopt principles such as data orchestration and CVEs, will find they’re in a better position to survive.

Microsoft is preparing to quarantine malicious versions of the SolarWinds Orion application used in recent nation state attacks, in a move that may crash systems.

The computing giant had previously released detections to alert customers of its Windows Defender security product if they were running the malicious updates. Although it was recommended that such customers isolate and investigate any such devices, the decision was down to them.

However, in an update yesterday Microsoft effectively said it was taking the decision out of the hands of its customers.

“Starting on Wednesday, December 16 at 8:00 AM PST, Microsoft Defender Antivirus will begin blocking the known malicious SolarWinds binaries,” it said.

“This will quarantine the binary even if the process is running. We also realize this is a server product running in customer environments, so it may not be simple to remove the product from service.”

Over the weekend reports emerged that a previous attack on FireEye was part of a much larger Russian intelligence plot to steal sensitive information from US government and countless other unnamed organizations.

The vector was Orion updates which the attackers managed to seed with malicious binaries used to install the Sunburst (aka Solarigate) backdoor malware. SolarWinds confirmed to the SEC that 18,000 customers were affected.

However, as the product performs crucial network management operations, Microsoft’s decision could theoretically cause some disruption.

“It is important to understand that these binaries represent a significant threat to customer environments,” it argued. “Customers should consider any device with the binary as compromised and should already be investigating devices with this alert.”

Microsoft urged victim organizations to immediately isolate affected devices, identify accounts used on the device and assume they have been compromised, reset passwords, look for lateral movement tools and more.