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We sat down for a virtual Q&A with Drew Del Matto, CFO of Netskope, to get his thoughts and advice for C-level executives who are navigating concerns for their workforce and ongoing business.
Question: How will COVID-19 change the conversation with executive teams and their boards of directors?
Drew Del Matto: Boards are focused on governance and they have a multitude of concerns, including employees, customers, and shareholders. Safety of employees is obviously paramount. As it relates to customers, boards and executives need to ensure that they’re accounting for new risks related to the new reality of a remote workforce and more cloud usage. These risks range from how customers interface with the company, its products or services, or how the customers’ sensitive data is treated. C-level executives are also focused on ensuring the ongoing continuity and velocity of the business. It’s now obvious that remote connectivity is an accepted way of doing business. COVID-19 has shined a light on this and it will likely encourage longer-term remote work habits as well. Companies now need to ensure people (and only the right people) have the required, ongoing connectivity and access to what they need to do their work. This requires a new security architecture as applications, data, and the network need to be secured beyond the world of physical data centers. This is a curveball to the world of old perimeters, and a catalyst for driving the increased digitization and use of cloud, primarily via business applications. COVID-19 effectively catalyzes enterprise migration to the cloud.
Question: What role should security be playing in executive boards in planning for this shift to remote work?
Drew Del Matto: From a governance point of view, the board and management have the responsibility to assess the situation, drive the business, and ensure that they’ve evaluated and properly addressed the business, cyber, and cloud risks. The silver lining is that everyone has been hyper-focused on IT and assessing cyber risk as a result of the many data breaches over the last several years. However, companies were focused on hard perimeters, which means physical worksites and physical data centers. People are now working everywhere, and this crisis shines a bright light on the mobility trend and related risks. This means that users are increasingly accessing the cloud for compute power, data, and applications. Said another way, to boards and the C-level, COVID-19 accelerates cloud security risk. Priorities are ensuring appropriate performance of the work, driving growth, and ensuring customers are served in an appropriate manner without business disruption. If approached correctly, it’s easy to imagine this becoming a windfall for cybercriminals. Suddenly everyone is doing something differently with a broadened attack surface, creating a massive opportunity for the bad guys.
Question: How has COVID-19 changed perspectives on what is considered remote work and how it is done for most companies?
Drew Del Matto: For the safety of employees, our country, and neighbors, we’re trying to avoid spreading the virus, or spreading it more quickly than necessary, in order to avoid overburdening the healthcare system. People are now working remotely, and they need the tools to do so. We’re hearing from our customers and prospective customers that some have those tools, but others don’t. In 2014, the average business had over 400 applications in use and today they have more than 1,400. This massive shift to cloud applications and ongoing digital transformation initiatives are converting countless enterprises into cloud-first companies. Many of these digital transformations are led by the busin