Ivanti’s Australian CISO Survey: How the Pandemic Has Shifted CISO Priorities

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced organisations to shift to an Everywhere Workplace model of working. Today, IT infrastructures are everywhere, and distributed employees need access to corporate data wherever they work, on any device. As organisations around the world consider making remote work a permanent option for their employees moving forward, we wanted to understand how the pandemic and mass shift to remote work has impacted CISOs. How has the changing IT security landscape challenged them and changed their priorities?

We commissioned independent market research agency Vanson Bourne to conduct a study examining how CISOs across Australia have responded to the COVID-19 crisis and the new remote work environment. Between March and April 2021, 80 CISOs from large enterprise organisations in Australia were interviewed to better understand their evolving security strategies.

The survey revealed that the shift to the Everywhere Workplace has forced CISOs to ensure that working from home is just as secure as working from the office. As a result, CISOs are now more focused on mitigating mobile security risks than combating enterprise network threats.

The Security Landscape Has Changed

The Everywhere Workplace has changed the cybersecurity battleground for the foreseeable future. Almost nine in ten (88%) of survey respondents agreed that remote work has accelerated the demise of the traditional network perimeter, which CISOs had been accustomed to defending. Mobile devices are now everywhere and have access to practically everything, which creates new security challenges for IT departments. At the same time, cybersecurity threats targeted at remote workers are reaching catastrophic new heights.

The majority (90%) of CISOs agreed that mobile devices have now become the focal point of their cybersecurity strategies, and two thirds (66%) stated that passwords are no longer an effective means of protecting enterprise data, as hackers are increasingly targeting remote workers and mobile devices.

When pressed on the main IT security challenges that their organisations have faced during the pandemic, CISOs overwhelmingly agreed that they have struggled to ensure that only trusted users, devices, networks, and apps can access company data.

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