How To Make Cyber Capabilities Drive Business Value

Actionable guidance to help accelerate cloud transformation in uncertain times

This year, many tech executives expect their overall IT budgets specific to cloud and infrastructure to grow up to 20% from last year.¹ This indicates digital transformation journeys into the cloud will continue to be top strategic IT initiatives poised to drive value to the business. Yet with the forecasted macroeconomic uncertainty, how can your IT leaders keep strategic digital initiatives on track?

One, perhaps less obvious, dynamic in helping answer that question is the relationship between cyber capabilities and business value. Simply put, investment in keeping your data and infrastructure secure and compliant frees up valuable resources that propel business growth and innovation. Concurrently, growth and innovation depend on the acceleration of your cloud transformation journey.

Now is the time to connect the dots. If you aren’t sure how, consider taking the following three actions.

1. Centralize visibility and control across clouds

A fast way to start unlocking business value is by centralizing observability, visibility and control across your private, hybrid and public clouds. These improvements in managing your cloud (or multi-cloud) environment will allow you to migrate workloads more quickly to the public cloud as you build net-new enterprise apps with modern app frameworks. You can complete initiatives in shorter timeframes and with better security outcomes because a central point of visibility and control delivers enterprise-wide observability across clouds for better security insights and coordinated actions.

^{Action = Invest in cyber capabilities that deliver end-to-end visibility — without blind spots.}

^{Example = Attack surfaces expand as IT provisions apps across different environments. How can you stitch security controls together for complete visibility so you can stop what you can’t see? Look for a cloud platform capable of seamlessly supporting advanced cybersecurity capabilities for visibility end to end across the entire enterprise. This includes endpoints, networks being traversed, the inner workings of traditional and modern apps and the data being accessed. Ensure you are collecting high-fidelity data including the traffic between virtual machines (VMs) on a single host, not just sample data from a network tap. This helps you accurately make the critical distinction between normal behaviors and anomalies.}

^{Value Outcome = Reduce risk and remediate issues faster.}

^{Action = Augment visibility and observability with artificial intelligence/machine learning driven analytics and network detection and response.}

^{Example = When your security team can’t trust the data or understand its context, your organization loses valuable time better spent on investigation and response. How can you prevent this? To get answers you can count on, look for a cloud platform and cyber capabilities with smart algorithms — powered by AI/ML — that can automate and pull intelligence out of what your team is seeing.}

^{Value Outcome = Free up resources to focus on high-impact initiatives.}

^{Action = Choose cyber solutions for cloud that deliver out-of-the-box operational confidence to take decisive action.}

^{Example = How do you turn enterprise-wide visibility and intelligence into action without filing support tickets during an incident? Look for cloud platform capabilities that deliver maximum security value out of the box with no configuration changes so you can get to resolution without opening tickets during an incident.}

^{Value Outcome = Scale response with confidence, gaining accuracy and speed to boost resiliency and continuity.}

2. Strengthen defenses and resiliency to improve your risk profile

Ransomware is now a boardroom discussion. Regulatory requirements are challenging to navigate. In today’s environment, better risk management can help your cloud transformation stay on track so you achieve your innovation, growth and competitive differentiation goals. Address potential disruption and unexpected costs with a renewed focus on improving your organization’s risk profile, including strengthening your defenses, cyber resiliency and compliance posture.

^{Action = Discover and evict threat actors that make it past your perimeter defenses.}

^{Example = Bad actors are clever. How can you determine whether a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connection request is legitimate? Look for solutions that help you understand what connections are coming in and what is happening on them so you can quickly find and remove threat actors using legitimate ports and protocols.}

^{Value Outcome = Maintain business continuity with strong ransomware protection for workloads.}

^{Action = Centralize policy management for consistent networking and security controls across deployments.}

^{Example = Industry and government regulations change. How can your enterprise IT admin push a common policy for three different sites/locations and prove consistency during an audit? Look for security solutions within a cloud platform that centralizes policy management with a single pane of glass for multi-tenant policy controls. Plan and deploy across multisite and multiregion without the risk of policies diverging over time.}

^{Value Outcome = Streamline compliance and avoid unforeseen costs.}

^{Action = Speed ransomware recovery and simplify operations.}

^{Example = How can you quickly recover without business disruption when a ransomware attack happens? Find a fully managed, purpose-built solution that supports rapid disaster recovery with replicated networking and security across sites, and that identifies, cleanses, validates and prevents reinfection during the recovery process using behavioral analysis and cloud Isolated Recovery Environments (IREs).}

^{Value Outcome = Boost cyber resiliency.}

3. Automate to augment existing resources and boost agility

Gaps in technical talent and training represent potential vulnerabilities to your business. Automating certain tasks, such as deploying workloads without opening a ticket for security and networking, frees up scarce resources to focus on strategic, higher-impact application development and delivery efforts. Automation is a classic “do more with less initiative” that is especially valuable in uncertain economic times.

^{Action = Support your cloud operating model with cyber capabilities.}

^{Example = Time is money. How can you go from 30 days to 30 minutes to deploy a secure workload? Look for solutions with capabilities that allow new workloads to inherit policies automatically, retire policies when a workload retires and move policies with the workload without dropping connections.}

^{Value Outcome = Extend resources, achieve CapEx and OpEx savings and operate with agility while making workloads more secure.}

^{Action = Automate policy recommendations as you provision or migrate workloads to different environments.}

^{Example = Your teams want to quickly migrate apps.How can they apply the right security policies if they don’t understand an application’s make up? Look for complementary cloud and security capabilities that automatically discover applications, present a complete application topology with the flows identified and deliver real-time policy recommendations you can review and commit.}

^{Value Outcome = Optimize your tech stack to its full potential and free up resources to focus on innovation.}

^{Action = Deploy scale-out software vs. a scale-up proprietary appliance for cyber capabilities.}

^{Example = How can you get an elastic, scale-out cloud operating model with high resiliency, agility and efficiency that hyperscalers have built on generic hardware for your infrastructure? Look to deploy scale-out software that enables automation. This reduces firewall rules and eliminates blind spots with zero proprietary appliances, zero tickets, and Zero Trust.}

^{Value Outcome = Gain higher resiliency, agility and efficiency when modernizing or migrating applications.}

“When you optimize cyber capabilities and automate networking and security to enable a true cloud operating model, you can realize agility and efficiencies with strong CapEx savings of up to 50% and OpEx savings up to 75%.” Ambika Kapur, VP of Networking and Security Business Unit, VMware

Navigating this year’s economic unknowns can be an ideal time for your organization to take a closer look at the relationship between cloud acceleration via cyber capabilities and the business advantages delivered. At VMware, we’re committed to securing the multi-cloud enterprise, helping organizations like yours achieve a strong, consistent security posture across their multi-cloud estates that spans perimeter, endpoints and everything in the middle.

Learn more in this Multi-Cloud Briefing.