Tanium’s blog post featuring Lumentum’s CIO Ralph Loura’s blog post really resonated with me on a couple of levels. The one thing in life that seems predictable is change. I know it is a bit cliche, but this has been true in my life. While sometimes it is difficult to see the positive aspect in situations, it seems to me that there is usually a lesson or nugget of knowledge one can take away from an event. Or perhaps a situation presents itself that you can seize to really make meaningful change in what you are doing. This quote I think is spot on.
“There are too many people who are too comfortable with the pillow and the snooze alarm and are just waiting for this to be over so they can go back to the way it used to be,” he says. “I think those people will have a lot of challenges coming up. I don’t think the world as we used to know it is coming back anytime soon.”
Where is the opportunity?
Loura does not see this as necessarily a bad thing but rather as an opportunity to let go of what was done before and rethink how to do things better moving forward.
Personally, my outlook is that change brings opportunity in life. Even a debilitating car wreck in my younger days resulted in investigating PC technology and eventually led to a relatively successful career in IT. So, when I read this blog about how the new Covid-19 scenario impacted IT organizations, and how he saw this as an opportunity for change, it really resonated with me.
On a professional level, if you reflect on larger companies, especially enterprise level ones, change usually is a slow, methodical process. Suddenly having your staff working remotely, some places even on BYOD machines, is a very good opportunity to pivot from one way of using technology and moving to another. This is what I think of when I talk about Digital Transformation.
Three things come to mind, Zero Trust, Windows Performance, and the risk in IT organizations of siloed teams.
Zero Trust
One striking change is the transformation of zero trust from magazine buzzword to business reality over the last year. Have you reimagined your network perimeter, with BYOD and remote workers considered? What do you do when you cannot manage or even trust the user’s endpoint? Or even worse, have no visibility to the endpoint at all?
Tanium can help address these concerns. It can be used to help secure endpoints in a BYOD/WFH scenario. If you have Tanium already, you probably have the infrastructure in place to do this. For more information, check the library of content at https://www.tanium.com/distributed-workforce/.
Performance
Windows Performance is a personal interest of mine and something I’ve made into a bit of a career. I feel for users with underperforming machines that therefore having a bad experience. It’s generally “easy” to remediate most performance issues. They are based in data. If you can see that data that is. I can’t count the amount of hours I’ve spent trying to get the right set of data to resolve a performance issue in an enterprise.
Tanium has the Performance module, which can give you that visibility into the health of not just an endpoint, but your fleet of endpoints. And a natural query language parser is ready to help you take that data and go through it in a myriad of ways.
Siloing and Risk
Another aspect that I saw a lot of while a field engineer (PFE) at Microsoft was siloing. I routinely encounter organizations where the company was siloed is such that the security and operations teams are reporting up to different C-levels. At times I’ve seen open hostility between security and operations staff. Almost like a turf war.
There is a myriad of problems with this situation, but one I think is the most critical is the security posture of an enterprise. If your operations and security teams are at odds, how are you securing your environment properly? Orion Hindawi (Taniums’ Co-Founder & CEO), Sarah Franklin (Salesforces’ Chief Marketing Officer) and Sunil Potti (Vice President and General Manager of Google Cloud Security) discuss this in a webinar, which I highly recommend.
Final thoughts
You cannot predict the future with certainty, but you can be certain that change is coming. Has your organization started its own digital transformation yet? If not, what’s holding it back? I think the old ‘normal’ is gone, but I don’t think the current ‘normal’ is the future either, so are you ready to pivot?
As Ferris Bueller said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
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