IDC Qatar CIO Summit 2023

While the threat landscape shows no signs of slowing down its pace of change and introduction of new threats, organizations require models that ensure the security and resilience of core systems and infrastructure are reliably enforced while remaining sufficiently resilient for future-ready service expectations.

The traditional approach to access security is outdated and no longer sufficient to address the challenges of today's complex IT environments. You need a newer, modern holistic approach using an intelligent identity and access security solution to secure every privilege, credential, endpoint, and remote access across your organization. What is needed today is a more modern, holistic approach that uses an intelligent identity and access security solution to secure every privilege, credential, endpoint, and remote access across the organization. This insightful discussion will explore the challenges of modern access security in complex IT environments and highlight the significance of dynamic, on-demand access for developers and cloud ops. Discover how you can secure and manage infrastructure access, customized to your unique needs and demands. Gain valuable insights into effective strategies for protecting privileges, credentials, endpoints, and remote access across your organization.

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.

Prevention against continuous malware attacks is critical, as is the augmentation of security operations with tools that ensure visibility across the entire estate while deploying prevention-first to safeguard business continuity. Teams are increasingly deploying AI and ML applications in and out of the cloud to ensure organizational cyber resilience via Zero Trust for a sustainable cyber-future of continuous and integrated protection.

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.

Digital innovators are using foundational cloud services to deliver modern and edge applications because these cloud services enable fast access to innovative technologies along with the scalability, security, and governance capabilities needed in the digital-first world. Learn what platform areas of foundational cloud services are growing fastest and why it is important for organizations as they transform themselves into software innovation factories. Hear about the drivers for foundational cloud services adoption, maturity trends, and how innovative development and DevOps teams are using application development and deployment capabilities to improve the velocity of application delivery for application modernization, cloud-native applications, and edge applications.