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Recently I participated in a webinar with Toks Oladuti (Netskope customer, and senior IT security manager at the international law firm Herbert Smith Freehills), and my colleague Neil Thacker (Netskope’s CISO EMEA). The conversation was hosted by Janet Day, a long-time technology consultant to the legal industry. During the webinar, we touched on a lot of topics and I was particularly interested to hear Toks’ stories of HSF’s journey to the cloud. But the discussion started, as many do at the moment, with thoughts around 2020’s unique demands on IT infrastructures, as whole organisations moved to remote working, and I wanted to share three of the points I took away from the discussion.
- The unique conditions of lockdown have hugely accelerated transformations that many had already planned to undertake (at a slower pace).
Toks told us that ahead of lockdown, HSF already had in place the remote working capabilities and necessary collaboration tools, but even with this head start, there was work to be done as the company was in the process of shifting from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. Before lockdown, collaboration platforms had been considered as supplementary to continued face-to-face practices, but with that no longer possible, the data sharing and collaboration elements of these tools quickly became critical. The HSF IT Security team had to fast track its plans for securing these collaboration tools.
Neil Thacker believes that the crisis has accelerated the onboarding of new applications that were originally planned for late 2020 or 2021, and cloud has been the saving grace for many organisations, allowing them to continue day-to-day operations with minimal disruption.
- 2020 has provided the opportunity to “rip the plaster off” old fas