IDC Kuwait CIO Summit 2023

The Middle East faces unprecedented cyberthreats, with global economic instability exacerbating the risks. While governments are accelerating the legislative process to modernize relevant laws and regulations, organizations need help modernizing their information security programs. Organizations must take a proactive approach to cybersecurity to protect their critical infrastructure, sensitive information, and brand reputation. This presentation will explore the top cybersecurity challenges facing organizations globally, zoom into specific challenges in the Middle East, and provide a comprehensive strategy for mitigating these risks that will allow organizations to mature their information security programs and, with that, become cyber-resilient.

Zero Trust is absolutely everywhere, with digital transformation across all sectors picking up speed, hybrid working in response to the pandemic or dealing with supply chain disruptions and geopolitical threats. Zero Trust is a representation of the new era of business agility, powered by digital, cloud and security transformation that is being increasingly permeated with new technologies, reshaping how vendors and organizations define it.

Cloud technologies can bring great advantages from cost savings, to resilience, but these benefits can also come at a cost if every last detail is not managed with security in mind. With products, services, and projects being pushed to the cloud the concept of securing the cloud takes on a whole new meaning and requires innovative strategies.

Today, network, application and security departments are struggling with massive network communication, hidden threats and misconfigurations which allows various vectors resulting in cyber security incidents. Network anomaly detection and response automation, deep network traffic analysis and data collection helps to get better insight into the organization’s current security posture. Why does network visibility really matter and how is it integral to building a resilient security architecture.

As a digital first approach to business has become the norm and organizations accelerate digital initiatives, increasingly adopt cloud, and modernize their applications using best practices for addressing change management.

Enterprises have increasingly adopted service management to address cross-team requests for standard actions and information. This is expected to accelerate over the next five years, evolving as the interactions of data, people, process, partners, and technology become increasingly complex and unpredictable.

Legal and compliance teams spend countless hours and substantial costs interpreting regulations and related guidance to ensure their organizations meet regulatory requirements, working closely with IT leaders to meet them. This requires technologies and strategies for modernizing regulatory change management that fit into the organization's overall risk and compliance transformation strategy.

We have entered a new era of marketing, one that is engaging a digital-first buyer and spurring marketing transformation. CMOs are under pressure to quickly evolve their approach and strategically drive business growth while managing costs. To achieve that, a genuine and value-based collaboration between the CMO and the CIO is critical. Marketing and technology leaders need to be fully aligned on the priorities for portfolio and data investments to deliver speed and agility for both programs and content. The rise of integrated, omni-channel business has moved from experimental to mainstream practices almost overnight. These emerging marketing imperatives will drive the CMO agenda to the heart of the overall digital agenda.

Compliance requirements and cybersecurity are usually intertwined, making close collaboration between IT security teams and compliance teams a necessity. As regulatory frameworks and compliance policies continue to evolve constantly to keep up with digital innovation, teams must stay ahead of the market and work closely with vendors and service providers to ensure they are in full adherence to regulations.

With the rapid rise in cloud technology investments over the pandemic period, organizations now grapple with securing the additional layers of complex cloud platforms. At the same time, companies have a sustained need for secure cloud migration processes. Security service providers should emphasize their cloud security-focused services to address these needs.

Security operations center (SOC) analysts are taxed to meet the demands of an expanding network surface, investigating alerts, a motivated adversary, and changing tools and tactics used to find indicators of compromise. The extended detection and response (XDR) cybersecurity software stack could be the panacea that brings in telemetry from endpoint, logs, web/email, and threat intelligence on one dashboard. The open questions remain about what else should go onto the stack, if best-of-breed point products can be integrated successfully, and what can be done within compliance frameworks.

When security teams can't see the wood for the trees and the number of security alerts leads to alarm fatigue and sluggish response times, it's time for more automation. Sandboxing-based solutions for the automated detection and analysis of advanced threats open up interesting possibilities here. Originally used as a special tool for incident response and digital forensics, modern sandboxing technologies have now become an important building block for process automation within the security environment. They provide significant integration and automation services and work in close cooperation with security operations technologies such as SIEM, SOAR, EDR, XDR and threat intelligence platforms.

Most organizations, in their initial forays into cloud computing, have made inroads with the portion of their application or workload portfolio that "easily" lends itself to cloud-based solutions — software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM or HR solutions, website innovations, and some customer experience innovations — but this is often only a piece of the entire digital infrastructure pie, and the question about what to do with all the remaining application workloads involves major investments, questions about added value, and many complex questions concerning how to deploy the cloud in a way that will avoid future problems.

There is no doubt that the future is in the cloud. But for IT leaders, this is only the beginning - as the cloud market matures, it is also becoming more complex. Organizations are turning to multicloud and hybrid strategies, making it imperative to choose the right service provider, operating model, and architecture that allows them to advance their business objectives.

The journey to enable digitization through business transformation is exciting yet requiring cautious and methodical strategies to enable a hybrid cloud operating model to optimize cost and complexity and drive competitive value and agility. What are some of the best practices, lessons learnt, and solutions to lay a solid foundation for building your hybrid cloud strategy?

Enterprises have been forced to adapt their business and operations to a new state of "normal," shifting from traditional office-based to distributed environments that must still provide the same level of connectivity, security, and efficiency across the organization. Keeping people, processes, applications, and "things" connected is now a focal point for organizations as they transform to adapt to these changing market conditions. Enterprises must have a cloud-driven strategy that keeps critical data in motion and maximizes investments in wireless and virtual networks and connected applications and tools to deliver business outcomes that improve business agility and maintain employee productivity and customer satisfaction.

As the world of work continues to evolve and organizations shift to hybrid work models, new challenges and opportunities present themselves. How can technology leaders leverage these shifts to enhance online and virtual experiences and strengthen competitiveness by developing people, talent, and skills? This panel session will examine how the technology talent market has changed and compelled organizations to leverage innovative work models. It will highlight the latest trends in hiring and managing talent amid the move toward hybrid work policies. In addition, panelists will discuss how organizations can change themselves and their team structures to leverage the current situation and enhance productivity. The session will conclude by highlighting how organizations can address the shortage of skilled technology professionals, given that the shift to distributed workforces has enabled them to retain global talent.

Sustainability is now a key priority for governments and enterprises across industries as they strive to meet the national and industry-specific ESG goals and regulations. CIOs will not only need to offer “sustainable / green” technology solutions for their customer organizations but would also require advise and handholding through the journey. This discussion would address roadmaps and solutions that support the data collection and reporting, governance and compliance and benchmarking needs towards sustainable strategies and technologies.