Cybersecurity and Cloud in 2022

Join ISG’s CMO, Paul Gottsegen, as he interviews ISG Advisor, Prashant Kelker, about cloud and cybersecurity trends and predictions for 2022. Learn how you should reorient your thinking to ensure your digital transformations don’t leave you vulnerable to cyberattacks or the consequences of a simplistic “cloud first” mindset.

Transcript:

Paul 

[Continued from previous video]

There's 10X more engagement by opening up globally and opening it up virtually. 

Prashant 

What I find interesting, Paul, is that most of the press writes about working virtual and what's going to happen with work from home. I think the press is missing out on what happens in the B2B world. 

So, you know, when we go behind the curtains with our organizations, we are seeing topics that I think the press is not talking about and they should be. Supply chain transparency, value chain health. 

Paul 

Well, let me hit on one of them. When we think workplace and working from home, from day one in the last couple of years, it’s about cybersecurity. I mean, cyber security is a broad topic, and I want you to address where you see it evolving. 

What are the elements of cyber that organizations need to think about differently that you've been seeing as you and your team have been engaging with so many enterprise clients? And I know it's a multidimensional problem, so just pick a few of the key areas. Give us a taste of what you're seeing. 

Prashant 

Cyber, as you said, is a dimension. And I think it impacts everything we do, so it should be treated not as a topic, but literally Paul like you said, it's a dimension. And we should go beyond the word cyber to ask:

• What is critical? 
• What do you want to protect? 
• Where do you expect a threat? 
• What happens when your current way of working gets dismantled? 
• What happens when the way you currently produce and expect supply chains gets dismantled? 
• What happens when suddenly all the devices which were not connected yesterday suddenly are connected today?

Because we have 5G and intelligent devices with edge and a IoT. Then what happens is that an asset, which could be critical, suddenly is an online critical device. So, I think cyber as a topic will go beyond the corporate floor, or as I call it, the carpeted floor. It's going to enter the concrete floor. It's going to enter on road/off road, under the Earth, offshore rigs. 

I think we’ve got to think about cyber much more broadly than what has to be done in single dimensions and applications. 

Paul 

Let me tie together that and something you said a few minutes back about the increased complexity of the provider ecosystem. Because organizations – they don't need to be told from us or anybody else that cyber is crucial, and they need to be well protected, that they have many different providers who are offering very respectable solutions. How is it possible for an organization in 2022 to sift through all of these possible opportunities for them? How can they navigate through something like that with something as imperative as cyber? 

Prashant 

I think organizations have done a very good job of capturing the value out of social, mobile and cloud. They've done a great job over the last 5-10 years. I think they have to watch out for the next Nexus of forces, and we expect this to be 5G, edge, AI, IOT and embedded devices. 

Now, what happens when these five things come together? Three things become possible. 

1. The first is you've got to think about what is secure and what's not secure. 
2. The second thing is: what is intelligent and what is not intelligent? 
3. The third thing is: what happens now when two or three things which were never connected together start getting connected. And then what are the economies coming out of this in a partner ecosystem? 

So, at ISG, we've started looking at secure, intelligent connected economies. SICE for short. And around SICEs we are looking at topics like digital engineering, embedded devices, embedded financial transactions. I think web three is going to float into this. This is, I think, what should be on the radar if you look two to three years from now. 

Paul 

And, very related to this as an underpinning, let's fly up to the clouds. Like cyber, cloud has been here for a long while. If you look at the ISG Index™, it's incredible. The discontinuity, the growth of everything as-a-service versus the more traditional managed service. So, we all know this the numbers bear it out. 

I'd like you to address the complexity here. Everybody is dealing with the cloud. They've had some success, but there's also some common hurdles that they might be facing, particularly if they've inherited two or three different hyper scaler environments. 

They're trying to figure out, “where do I put which workload and how,” and public versus private. How should they think about some of the new challenges of being successful leveraging the cloud moving into next year? 

Prashant 

I think my heart goes out to the IT departments in every organization, because they've been pushed with messages like “cloud first” and cloud right and go to cloud, think cloud first, design cloud, you know, work backwards from cloud, so there's been such social pressure to go to cloud that they have really done it… to the point that it's now time to dial back and see what worked what didn't work. 

Using major insurance firms as an example. Many are looking at their mainframe workloads, which, you know, everybody makes fun of, but mainframes are probably the most efficient platform-as-a-service ever made. 

So, we’ve got to dial back and see. Let's move away from hyperscalers. Move away from messages like cloud first, which sound to me like “mobile first.” And, instead, let’s start looking at the workload you're dealing with. 

• Is this a workload that needs trust? Then maybe blockchain is where you should be looking at. 
• Is this a workload which needs connectivity? Then you should be starting to look at MEC – mobile edge computing. 
• Or is this a corporate workload? Then you’ve got to look at one of the hyperscalers. 
• Is this a workload which needs analytics? Then maybe you need a combination of Snowflake and the rest of your cloud.

We should go back to the first principles on design of workloads and not fall for newspaper headlines.