IDC: How to protect your business through security audit & recovery strategy

So, welcome to this webinar, where we're going to talk about cyber resiliency and actually about Identity as a key component to cyber resiliency. My name is Jan Horsager. I'm Research Director at IDC, and I'm joined here today by Alistair Holmes from Quest. Personally, I have been spending the last 30 years covering information technology and digital transformation. And Alistair, could you maybe introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself and your role in Quest? Yeah, how are you and thanks for the welcome. My name is Alistair Holmes. I work for Quest Software. I'm a Principal Solutions Architect. I work across the whole of Ahmedia and my specialization is, I think what we call today, cyber resilience. I've been with Quest for about 10 years, and prior to that, I spent about 20 years with a Microsoft Certified training company, so I live and breathe Active Directory. Excellent. Thank you very much, Alistair. And let's start just by looking at the cybersecurity trends right now in 2021, or the new normal or how you would like to label the year that we are in right now. And no matter how you want to label it, the fact is that we are seeing new trends and we are seeing a new pressure on the digital infrastructure and that means that the cybersecurity in reality, of course, is changing and under pressure. Digital business is, of course, not a new thing. But the point is that, even though we were moving fast towards true digital transformation before 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, well, the digital business has really taken off, turbocharging the development into new businesses, new ways of creating not only markets, but also new ways of doing services and doing them remote and doing them online is the new trend. And that puts the customer experience in as a priority, which opens even new sort of pressure when it comes to cybersecurity and handling data and not least handling identities. And that, of course, creates these evolving IT systems, meaning that, even though that digital transformation was going fast, well, again, there's been a speed up when it comes to the infrastructure and the IT systems either need to be either replaced or upgraded or even invented from the bottom up right now, and automation is an important part of that. And again, the automation, new risks, new pressure on the security part. So the COVID-19 has actually been rewriting the rules here. And again, back to-- we have speeded up in 2020. And on top of that, the working from home and remote trends has created, also from day one, a new pressure on most organizations. So, what we see right now and what we have been discussing together with Quest, we have produced an analyst perspective where we are looking at the need to actually monitor your digital infrastructure. This is a key to create the fast solution if security incidents, or should I say when security incidents, is actually occurring, like hacking ransomware or any other incidents. So, organizations must, of course, put the tools in place to monitor and audit identities as well as recovering and restoring data. When we are looking at IDC's European security survey and drill into the United Kingdom, and ask the organizations in the United Kingdom of the factors that significantly limits the ability to improve IT security capabilities, well, there's one answer that actually tops the list of answers here. Well, the security team spends time maintaining and managing security tools rather than performing Security Investigations. And 68% of organizations say that this is a significant limits to their ability to improve IT security capabilities. But if we look at what the new needs are, because, yes, you need to actually work with the tools. You need to balance the time, you need to balance the automation, you need to work with the audits and the ability to get what we call visibility of activities, vulnerabilities, and threats, you need to control device's access and identities. And, of course, there's a need for the orchestration of multiple truth sets to improve that resilience. But that does not mean that the team needs to spend all the time in that place. That's what solutions are for. That's what security solutions are for these days. And that talks us directly into or up to, I need to say, our digital trust picture at IDC. This is not about trust as such. This is about trustworthiness. This is about any organization today and in the time moving forward. We need to ensure customers, stakeholders, that they are actually on top of that digital trust, and the IT security is a compulsory part here, so it's a compliance. So, it's a given thing. Your stakeholders need to believe that you are actually taking care of this, that you are working with these things, because they want to discuss privacy strategies, ethics, and social responsibilities, and other stuff that has to do with your digital solutions, but the security need to be something that you are on top of. And how you get there, Alistair, I'll actually leave to you to talk a bit more about that. Yeah, thanks, Jan. So, I want to talk about cyber security the way that the Quest actually see it. And we've been in the cybersecurity business for quite a long time now. We're back up recovery, auditing-type products. I don't think that whether that we sort of really classified it as a cybersecurity as such. But we, like most organizations, have had to change and adapt. And one of the things that I spend a lot of time talking to customers about is that cybersecurity is all encompassing. But really, in the event that you get hit with a ransomware or some sort of malware attack, identity is absolutely everything. You can have the best backups in the world, but if you've got