81% of enterprises accelerated their IT modernization processes due to the pandemic.

Cybersecurity has become a chief concern among many business leaders. As businesses keep shifting and becoming more and more digital, they expose themselves more to the threat surface. And the global pandemic has worsened the cybersecurity vulnerabilities; companies face on a regular scale. In the meantime, cyber threats have grown from manageable to complex attacks built using similar higher algorithms and sophisticated technologies. Hence, to mitigate the risk and damage associated with cybersecurity, enterprises are assessing risks and leveraging technology to improve defenses via security-by-design. Implementing enterprise cybersecurity protocols are important, especially when an organization, its employees, and its customers and relate data, all are at stake.

Fortunately, COVID acts as the necessary enabler behind companies rapidly approaching to implement security protocols. A recent survey of IT leaders completed by CensusWide and sponsored by Centrify reveals that 73% of enterprises (over 500 employees) accelerated their cloud migration plans to support the shift to remote working across their organizations due to the pandemic. This also includes small and medium-sized businesses adjusting and improving their approach to cybersecurity. 60% adjusted their cloud security postures as a result of distributed workforces or remote working. At the same time, 83% of large-scale enterprises moved to adopt cybersecurity practices. And nearly 32% of large-scale enterprises, having over 500 employees are implementing more automation using artificial intelligence-based tools this year.

For the largest enterprises, IT modernization equates to digitizing more processes using cloud-native services (59%), maintaining flexibility and security for a partially remote workforce (57%) and revisiting and adjusting their cybersecurity stacks (40%). Overall, 81% of these enterprises accelerated their IT modernization processes due to the pandemic. Next, 51% of enterprises with 500 employees or more are making remote and secure access their highest internal priority. In contrast, 27% of all organizations' IT heads have prioritized on providing secure, granular access to IT admin teams outsourced IT and third-party vendors. The survey authors have observed that the larger the enterprise, the more critical remote access becomes. The survey also found that organizations with 250 – 500 employees are more probable to purchase specific cybersecurity tools and applications to meet compliance requirements.

It is important to note that enterprise cybersecurity differs from traditional cybersecurity. The former is a more sophisticated solution that takes the age-old premise of cybersecurity and extends it to all levels of modern-day business computing. Enterprise cybersecurity strategies are designed to safeguard data as it travels between remote wireless devices and onto cloud servers, unlike traditional cybersecurity that protects data locally. Further, enterprise cybersecurity methodologies need to examine third-party providers and protect the increasing number of endpoints connected to a business network via the Internet of Things (IoT).

According to the survey, one out of every three IT leaders interviewed, 34%, say their budgets have increased during the pandemic. Moreover, more leaders are now open to the idea of utilizing cybersecurity practices in the long term as a part of their digital transformation program. IT leaders need to have a proactive response plan that helps them have the edge over future attacks. Though attackers are indeed continuing to innovate and find new ways to attack and extract, developing new strategies and technologies that can counter such threat is always a win. McKinsey suggests that to avoid becoming barriers to the digitization and instead become its enablers, IT and cybersecurity teams must transform their capabilities along three dimensions. This means they must use quantitative risk analytics for decision making, build cybersecurity into the business value chain. Further, they must support the next generation of enterprise-technology platforms, which include innovations like agile development, robotics, and cloud-based operating models.