Over the winter holidays, Southwest Airlines, one of the U.S.’ largest and most reputable airlines was forced to cancel around 45% of its scheduled flights. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact reason for this meltdown, but in my opinion this is likely due to outdated infrastructure and IT systems. Other airlines also had to deal with bad weather and holiday traffic, but were not faced with the same level of disruption.
When you use legacy, inefficient IT infrastructure, it will eventually buckle under the pressure of unexpected changes. Some organizations hold onto their outdated systems because they don’t see the sense in changing something that is working fine, but it only takes one change to cause a major meltdown. And I’m not just talking about bad weather or high consumer demand. Major pressures could include security-related events like a breach or even new regulations and compliance coming online.
Security needs to be part of your modernization efforts
The good news is that many organizations have proactively modernized their operations by moving processes into the cloud. But one of the common mistakes is that IT security is often left behind.
The reality is that, alongside digital transformation comes new end-user expectations and security requirements. Your employees will likely want to use their own personal devices as they work remotely. And with cloud-native apps, your data can now be accessed by users from anywhere and on any endpoint, which means you no longer have the visibility and control you’re used to when everything was on premises.
In an effort to support hybrid work, you may enable your users to access corporate resources from anywhere. But without cloud-native security solutions to match these changes, you will not be ready for major security events. Security breaches is one aspect of it, where a single account takeover may result in the loss of sensitive data. But also think about compliance. How do you protect regulated data if you lack the visibility and controls over your cloud operations?
By modernizing your IT security, organizations will be able to:
- Simplify the complex IT security architectures that backhaul all IT traffic into physical data centers
- Free up overworked and understaffed IT security teams from day-to-day management of appliance-based web proxies, virtual private networks (VPNs), and data loss protection (DLP) controls
- Provide better security efficacy with adaptive and inline security controls
- Create a better end-user experience and improve their productivity
Reduce your IT security’s complexity with a platform
To reap the benefits of a modernized IT system, you need to transform your organization’s security strategy alongside it. The answer lies in a unified, cloud-delivered security platform that combines endpoint security with secure access to apps and data. With all of your security controls in one place, you’ll have more visibility and control with fewer potential complications.
To learn more about how you can modernize your organization’s IT security, visit our Lookout Security Platform page.
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