When Nick Savvides joined Forcepoint earlier this year, little did he know that instead of having strategic discussions with his team and customers seated around a conference table, he would be attempting to build a bicycle while riding it.
Which ironically is what most of the cybersecurity business was attempting as Covid-19 struck at the very roots of planning and shifted attention totally to ensuring that things functioned in a dynamic workplace that involved people working from home. “In fact, the day I joined as Head of Strategy for APAC region at Forcepoint, also was the day the lockdown began,” he says.
In fact, his priorities changed almost overnight as Forcepoint had to shift gears from its position as a cloud-based cybersecurity service to a more tactical role. The company had to jump in and help clients shift their focus to adapting to newer security postures in order to continue the business continuity in tough times.
The customer CISOs suddenly faced a situation where plans for six-twelve-eighteen months had to be implemented much faster, given that the challenges thrown up by work-from-home requirements were enormous and never-seen before.
“In some ways, Forcepoint had adopted the ideas such as adoption of cloud, serverless computing and such other concepts that is now leading to SASE (pronounced Sassy). Gartner called it that while Forrester has the concept called ZeroTrust. Basically, the network is abstracted away.”
In fact the last six months has resulted in cyber security experts suddenly feeling confident about getting five years of work done in just six months. In this conversation with CXOToday for CXOTalks, Savvides shares his insights on the future, given that the past six months has brought in a paradigm shift in cybersecurity.
