Remote work occurred overnight, by necessity rather than by design and style: Sumed Marwaha, MD, Unisys India
In India, organizations across sectors such as BFSI, manufacturing, e-commerce, healthcare, and government are moving to the cloud ecosystem. This movement to the cloud is related with cybersecurity dangers as the classic perimeter safety can no longer shield the enterprise network from malicious attackers. Sumed Marwaha, regional services vice-president and managing director for Unisys India, talks to Sudhir Chowdhary about cybersecurity evolving with the Covid-19 outbreak and the value of cloud in a hybrid working model. Excerpts:
Why is migrating to the cloud becoming crucial for organizations across sectors?
When the pandemic struck, cloud adoption emerged as a price-helpful and viable strategy towards operating remotely and supplying seamless access to organisational information and sources to staff. The added benefits that cloud technologies presents are:
Reduced capital expenditure: With price pressures mounting, the spend-per-use model presented by cloud technologies aids organisations as they now have the solution to convert capital expenditure to operational expenditure.
Greater flexibility: The rapid provisioning and resulting flexibility presented by cloud technologies aids firms respond quicker to varying industry and consumer demands.
Greater resilience: The higher availability and low latency of cloud make it a viable technologies backbone for remote working.
Even in the post-pandemic world, remote and hybrid models of working are anticipated to continue, as is the continued adoption of cloud technologies. With increasing awareness amongst each cloud service providers and organisations as properly as improvements in cloud safety, challenges prohibiting the adoption of cloud are becoming addressed more successfully, driving higher adoption of cloud technologies.
How are hybrid workplace models altering cloud methods for enhancing employee encounter?
Workplace technologies is an vital dimension of employee encounter. With most, if not all staff working remotely, firms are focused on the type of workplace technologies and general encounter presented to their employees so as to assure higher productivity, collaboration and consequently, superior consumer outcomes. The remote and hybrid methods of working are anticipated to continue even following the pandemic as organisations and staff have realised the merits of operating this way. However, some of the crucial challenges of working in this manner are supplying seamless access to enterprise information, applications and sources to staff as properly as enabling helpful collaboration. Adoption of cloud technologies has confirmed to be an helpful strategy towards addressing these challenges. Increased efficiency, ease of deployment, remote accessibility and facilitation of collaboration – these are some of the added benefits presented by cloud technologies that make it a priority in the world of hybrid or remote working.
Why should really IT leaders prioritise cloud adoption and education for staff? What type of measures has Unisys India implemented on this front?
The pandemic has changed workplaces and workforces considerably. Remote work occurred overnight, by necessity rather than by design and style. The Digital Workplace Insights Report, an IDC White Paper sponsored by Unisys reveals that across the globe, pretty much 40% of the workforce was forced to shift to remote methods of working pretty much overnight, even though the remaining 60% continued to adapt and locate new, safer methods to do their jobs. With the workforce scattered to home offices, enabling safe access to enterprise information and sources became a priority and cloud technologies, the viable strategy to this.
Unisys is focused on the cloud and infrastructure space and has partnerships with top players in this space such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Our cloud teams are continually receiving educated and certified on varied cloud technologies to hold them abreast of the technological adjustments and innovations in this space.
What are some of the ideal practices and safety protocols to be followed by organizations, to curb network or cloud-connected cyber threats?
Cybersecurity is a crucial priority for all firms, in particular in the new normal. Some of the ideal practices firms can comply with to curb network or cloud-connected cyber threats are:
- Less use of old-style VPNs that do not scale and more use of Zero Trust processes and technologies, such as constantly-on encrypted direct access, identity verification tools and a software program-defined perimeter to limit the harm from malware.
- Look beyond “winning” with safety and focus on resilience and trust. A correct focus on trust and resilience could be the distinction amongst regardless of whether an organisation recovers or not.
- Be forward-facing: Prioritise and implement adoption of next-generation cyber tools.
- Focus on the human angle of cybersecurity.
