CISOs today intersect with all facets of the business, whether that be liaising with network teams to manage performance, or balancing the costs of IT operations to avoid isolation from core business functions. Successful CISOs navigate these intersections by adopting proactive strategies in order to transition from a back-office role and become recognised as valued strategic partners within their organisations.

Businesses manage a series of balancing acts every day—between innovation and reliability, for instance, investment or profit, speed or security. Each leader contributes to how decisions are weighed and made, and traditionally CISOs have been expected to operate at one end of that scale, as the chief protector of the business.

Over the past two decades, data has become a critical asset for nearly every organisation. Consequently, a variety of regulations and industry standards now govern business operations. In today’s data-driven age, certification through security audits serves as a testament to an organisation’s adherence to industry standards, regulations, and security measures.

The exploitation of cloud services is a flexible weapon in the hands of attackers, so flexible that we uncover new campaigns abusing legitimate apps on a daily basis.

I am excited to see Apple’s recent expansion of identity support in Apple Business Manager, their device and app lifecycle management tool for the enterprise. Simply put, it enables wider adoption of Managed Apple IDs by allowing organizations to use corporate email addresses as corporate Apple IDs, and integrate with a broader range of identity providers (IdPs) beyond Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra ID.

In our last blog post, we discussed how customers can accelerate cloud transformation with Netskope Borderless SD-WAN and AWS Cloud WAN integration. This network-level integration allows customers to automate workload access from any remote site and user laptop, delivering a secure, reliable, flexible, highly available, and optimized middle-mile network service leveraging the AWS global network.

This blog is part of the ongoing “I&O Perspectives” series, which features insights from industry experts about the impact of current threats, networking, and other cybersecurity trends.

There are more SaaS applications in use by businesses than ever before—and the adoption rate is only going to continue to increase. According to Netskope’s annual Cloud & Threat Report, SaaS adoption continued to rise in enterprise environments throughout 2023, with users constantly accessing new, mostly unmanaged, apps and increasing their use of existing apps.