IT Data practices and policies still wanting

There is an apt and honest editorial cartoon about Change.

From https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Who-Wants-Change-Crowd-Change-Management-Yellow.png

I was a guest of Channel Asia Executive Roundtable last week. I joined several luminaries in South East Asia to discuss about the topic of “How Partners can bring value to the businesses to manage their remote workforce“.

Covid-19 decimated what we knew as work in general. The world had to pivot and now, 2+ years later, a hybrid workforce has emerged. The mixture of remote work, work-from-home (WFH), physical office and everywhere else has brought up a new mindset and new attitudes with both the employers and their staff alike. Without a doubt, the remote way of working is here to stay.

People won but did the process lose?

The knee jerk reactions when the lockdowns of Covid hit were to switch work to remote access to applications on premises or in the clouds. Many companies have already moved to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) way of working but not all have made the jump, just like not all the companies’ applications were SaaS based. Of course, the first thing these stranded companies do was to look for the technologies to solve this unforeseen disorder.

People Process Technology.
Picture from https://iconstruct.com/blog/people-process-technology/

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Sassy Cato

I am not cybersecurity guy at all. Cybersecurity, to me, is a hodgepodge of many things. It is complex and it is confusing. But to every organization that has to deal with cloud SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications, mobile devices, work from home, and the proliferation of network connections from everywhere to the edge and back, strong cybersecurity without the burden of sluggish performance and without the complexity of stitching the cybersecurity point solutions would be a god send.

About 3 1/2 years ago, when I was an independent consultant, I was asked by a friend to help him (I was also looking for a gig) sell a product. It was Aryaka Networks, an SD-WAN solution. It was new to me, although I had some MPLS (multi protocol label switching) knowledge from some point in my career. But the experience with Aryaka at the people level was not too encouraging, with several people I was dealing with, switching positions or leaving Aryaka, including their CEO at the time, John Peters. After about 4 months or so, my friend lost confidence and decided to switch to Cato Networks.

Cato Networks opened up my eyes to what I believe cybersecurity should be. Simple, performant, and with many of the previous point requirements like firewall, VPN, zero trust networks, identity management, intrusion prevention, application gateways, threat detection and response, remote access, WAN acceleration and several more, all beautifully crafted into a single cloud-based service. There was an enlightenment moment for a greenhorn like me as I learned more about the Cato solution. That singularity of distributed global networking and cybersecurity blew me away.

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