With businesses moving apps and data to the cloud – why leave security behind on-premise?

By Ravindra Kelkar, Area Vice President, Indian Subcontinent, Citrix

The last year has indeed been a year of transformation, one that established mobile work as the “new normal”. Amidst this, the pandemic has highlighted the criticality of cloud services, helping reinforce an already well-established trend – that more and more applications are finding their way into the cloud and with them workflows and entire business processes as well.IT security is expected to soon follow suit. This raises a few questions.

Keeping employees at the core
As we have seen during this global pandemic, with the increased adoption of remote working models, empowering employees has become more of an imperative for organizations and the need to keep them engaged has never been higher. Companies have realized that they must be ready for any such disruptions, not just due to lockdowns, but also in case of a fire, flood, or any major event that happens to take place in the vicinity of a company’s headquarters, to ensure business continuity.

Resilience: a business imperative
For all knowledge workers, and especially for mission-critical members of the workforce,resilience of business operations will always mean resilience of work practices. For the longest time, when it came to remote work, resilience was just seen as an addendum and never a priority. Companies enabled work from home for employees mainly because it boosted productivity and sped up the workflow while at the same time accommodating employees’ work-life balance. This is why an increasing number of employees were already accessing company resources remotely, even before the pandemic hit.

More and more of the resources required by employees, including digital workspaces,are already based in the cloud, and the recent surge in remote working has only catapulted it further. This is also affirmed by a leading analyst firm’s recent report, which states that spending on public cloud services in India is expected to grow 29.4% to $4.1 billion in 2021 from $3.1 billion in 2020.

It’s all about that SASE!
Cloud services give businesses the ability to quickly scale and deliver a multitude of services via the Internet. Most business essentials have already made their way to the cloud, and IT security isn’t too far behind in the digital transformation wagon, with SASE leading it from the front. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) – a term coined a few years back, describes that functions for securing distributed resource usage will merge with functions for accelerating remote access to create a unified cloud service.

Cloud-based security via SASE includes features such as securing cloud access and the continuous monitoring of end devices for security-related anomalies – tasks that directly affect the business, as digitization implies that IT security will increasingly determine overall corporate security. If more and more business applications are located in the cloud, it makes sense to also govern the security infrastructure via the cloud, by virtue of the cloud advantages of agility, scalability, and high service availability. Therefore, the cloud will eventually and inevitably gain more traction in the security space, too.

Cloud is the secure way forward
Prior to the pandemic, when compared to more developed countries,India was at an early stage of cloud adoption.But recent events have led to an unprecedented surge in India’s digital transformation and cloud journey. Digital transformation ultimately means being able to work independent of the location through cloud-based solutions, while not having to worry about security. This is not just for the resilience of the business but also in terms of higher productivity. It is important that both remote workplaces and the security building blocks are able to move to the cloud, in a way and at the pace envisaged by a company’s individual digitization strategy. Hence, it is crucial for every company to design their cloud focused remote work strategy well and include all the necessary security functions within it.

‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ and neither should your cloud security strategy. But much like Rome in the age-old adage, all roads certainly now lead us to the cloud.