From the results of the two recent reports which explored cybersecurity trends, challenges and priorities for CIOs in Europe and the LATAM region, Haider Pasha, Chief Security Officer, EMEA and Latin America at Palo Alto Networks, outlines what businesses can do to foster greater collaboration and how Palo Alto Networks helping its clients to proactively monitor, analyse and prevent sophisticated threats.
Many respondents highlighted between-department collaboration as a major area for improvement if businesses want to foster collaboration within the c-suite. What is a good approach to enhance this collaboration?
Collaboration is, without doubt, crucial in today’s business environment. One of the most effective approaches I’ve observed is when CIOs view their role as a partnership with the business, actively seeking champions across the organisation to support their initiatives.
Take Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an example. AI is a vast and complex topic, but automation, a key aspect of AI, is on every CIO’s agenda. Our report revealed that nearly 32% of CIOs are keen to drive some level of automation within their organisations. While some have already embarked on this journey, others are just beginning. However, driving automation is no small feat. When a CIO approaches a business leader with the intent to implement automation, they cannot proceed without solid data to justify the initiative. This is where the partnership becomes vital.
Collaboration, in this context, means forming a strong partnership with business leaders. It involves having champions on both the IT and business sides who have a mutual understanding of each other’s goals. These champions work together to achieve a common outcome. Such projects are far more likely to succeed compared to those undertaken in isolation and then rolled out across the organisation.
In essence, successful initiatives are those where collaboration is at the core, where CIOs do not work in silos but rather in tandem with business leaders, leveraging each other’s strengths to drive innovation and efficiency across the business.
How does Palo Alto Networks help its clients to proactively monitor, analyse and prevent sophisticated threats?
Palo Alto Networks has been a significant player in the industry for more than 15 years. We initially made our mark as a next-generation firewall vendor, developing technology that fundamentally disrupted the market. Our approach allowed for deep inspection of the application layer, offering insights that traditional firewall methods couldn’t achieve. But we didn’t stop at inspection; we also implemented policies to protect that data in ways that others struggled to match and many still haven’t.
Over the past five to eight years, we’ve expanded our capabilities to support our customers in transitioning to the cloud. As data has increasingly moved to cloud environments, so too have our security solutions. We’ve pioneered the concept of autonomous security operation centres, reducing the need for large teams constantly monitoring screens. Instead, we leverage AI and Machine Learning to automate much of the backend work, enabling human intervention only when critical decisions need to be made. This approach has significantly reduced the mean time to recovery or react – from days to, in some cases, mere minutes.
Our mission as an organisation is to enhance cybersecurity outcomes for businesses across all sectors and regions, using real-time automation not just for detection, but also for response. By automating these processes, we help organisations achieve greater cyber-resilience, ensuring they are better equipped to handle threats as they arise.
Looking ahead, what are some key trends that will affect the way organisations approach cybersecurity?
There are certainly challenges that we must be mindful of, alongside opportunities that could significantly benefit us. Firstly, regarding challenges, the attack surface for organisations is not shrinking; in fact, it is continually expanding. As CIOs and IT teams implement various projects to meet business demands, this growth in the attack surface inevitably draws more attention from attackers, providing them with multiple entry points into the environment. This is an ongoing concern that will persist as the attack surface continues to widen.
Secondly, the traditional reaction time that organisations once had – where decisions could be made over the course of a few days – has drastically shortened. With the rise of AI-based cyberattacks, the window for responding to threats has shrunk from days to minutes and soon it will be a matter of seconds. This acceleration in required response time is a critical issue that organisations must address to stay ahead of evolving threats.
On a more positive note, AI offers significant advantages, particularly through what we refer to as ‘platformisation’. Unlike the traditional, product-focused approach, a platform-based strategy allows for the integration of AI across various domains, whether it be the cloud, networks, or security operations centres. At Palo Alto Networks, we have been embedding AI into our technology from the outset, so while AI is not new to us, organisations now have the opportunity to focus on platformisation. This approach enables not just consolidation but also the optimisation of cybersecurity postures through AI-driven platforms.
Click here to read part One – Cybersecurity trends, challenges and priorities for CIOs- Part One
