KEY TAKEAWAYS - The Zscaler Virtual CXO Summit, Summer 2021 Episode #1 - Reducing the Risk and Complexity of Secure Cloud Deployment

About this event

The new cyber-threat era is complex, accelerated, and unrelenting. It demands leaders who can prioritize agility over complexity, security over complacency, and innovation over stagnation. Achieving those enterprise objectives requires perseverance, collaboration, and secure digital transformation. The Zscaler Virtual CXO Summit brings together industry-leading CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, and CISOs to share insights, expertise, and experience. The Summer 2021 Series focuses on the theme “The New Enterprise CXO Priorities: Secure Cloud Workloads, Optimize Performance, Preserve the Environment.”

Watch episode #1, “Reducing the Risk and Complexity of Secure Cloud Deployment” - Americas/EMEA

CXO Fireside Chat - “Cloud Protection Strategies for Innovation, Transformation, Risk Reduction, and Improved Security”

This week’s CXO Summit event began with a panel session of CXO leaders discussing their experience applying security best practices within multi-cloud enterprise environments. Zscaler SVP for Cloud Protection Rich Campagna moderated the event. In the two sessions -- one targeting the EMEA region, another targeting the Americas -- Campagna spoke with Paolo Vallotti, CISO and VP of Operations for Tate & Lyle; Gregory Simpson, Former SVP and CTO of Synchrony Financial; and Gram Ludlow, VP and CISO for a global hospitality company.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the two discussions.

The present and future are multi-cloud, and that introduces new security challenges.

“There's been a real evolution in companies' adoption of cloud, going from ‘Am going to dip my toes into it?’ or ‘Am I going to go into the cloud?’” noted Gram Ludlow, VP and CISO for a global hospitality company. “Now most companies find that they are in the cloud, and multiple clouds. I guess you could say we've migrated to the clouds.”

Gregory Simpson, Former SVP and CTO of Synchrony Financial observed that the cloud represents the future of innovation and that it’s time for enterprises to embrace it, or face being left behind.

“[T]he reality is the cloud is where the innovation in our industry happens,” explained Simpson. “It's where the innovation for technology occurs. And so if you want to be a successful company in the future, you have to go with the cloud…It's important that you plug in, and accept the fact that you're going to be in the cloud in a big way, if you're not already.”

Development and security teams must collaborate, prioritize security in dev cycles.

Tate & Lyle CISO and VP of Operations Paolo Vallotti shared an evolving blueprint for ensuring security is incorporated into new product development. And that starts with creating agile teams, and pairing developers and infosec leads in product development cycles.

“It's better to engage the security team at the very early stage of the design,” said Vallotti. “[C]ost is one driver, definitely, but if you don't have enough money to secure the solution in the proper way, it's very difficult to add security to a project later...at the same time, designing it together will make it easier.”

Former Synchrony Financial SVP and CTO Simpson takes it a step further, commenting that -- if the cloud development environment is designed and managed correctly, risk can be reduced.

“Segregation of duties is also critical,” explained Simpson. “You read about cloud breaches where some developer left something open...they shouldn't even have the privileges to be able to leave something open. You want very, very few people that are able to screw things up such that you can have your door left open.”

Mitigating ransomware, cyberattack risks requires comprehensive data visibility.

Vallotti made the additional point that efforts to protect corporate interests from cyberattack should start with a comprehensive understanding of how enterprise users are employing cloud resources.

“Knowing what is in the cloud, to begin with, is very important,” said Vallotti. “With a data center, everything is within your four walls. Then you move to the cloud and people can spin up new servers, with just a few lines of code. Your data is almost everywhere...knowing exactly what you have, and what your attack surface looks like...is very important...And then, the most important thing is continuous scanning and monitoring of everything that is open.”

When it comes to managing security risk, Zero Trust is transformative.

Hospitality industry veteran Ludlow counsels the tangible benefits of Zero Trust, calling its tenets “huge opportunities to enhance the security of core IT platforms by going to the cloud, and by going to these new architectures and platforms.”

“[Zero Trust is] an approach to information technology that is transformative when it comes to managing security risk,” noted Ludlow. “And what I see in these new architectures, where you're writing infrastructure as code, great, but if you're building it from scratch, you can build it right from scratch. You can almost escape the sins of the past by building a better future through replatforming.”

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