EarlyBirds, an Australian firm that has developed a global open innovation platform with services where early adopters, innovators, and subject matter experts (SMEs) can collaborate to find ways to hasten technology advancement and adoption in an organisation, can help with cybersecurity by enabling zero trust. The zero trust approach to cybersecurity spans a mindset that affects all devices, users, and workloads both within and outside the company’s security ecosystem.
The core idea behind zero trust is that no one is to be given automatic access to anything, which means all personnel, systems, and code should request for access to data and other resources in the system. The decision to provide or deny access will have to be done on a case-by-case basis.
CIO INFLUENCE: CIO Influence Interview with Russ Ernst, Chief Technology Officer at Blancco
There are many advantages of taking a zero-trust approach for cybersecurity.This includes ensuring that functional areas clean up the organization’s security environment, the ability to speedily isolate threats, enhancement of the ability to respond fast to threats, and decreasing the potential for an intruder to move undetected within the system.
The move towards adopting a zero-trust policy is necessary in view of the growing security challenges faced by organisations as they enable remote work policies on a vast scale and increase the number of endpoint devices located outside the corporate offices.In addition, there have been a significant rise in cyberattacks.
However, adopting a zero-trust approach is not without challenges that organisations need to overcome. A piecemeal strategy may leave security gaps as this may not take into account the various hardware, architectural, and software challenges. An overall product is not yet available and legacy systems may not be able to adapt. Adopting zero trust requires a continuous commitment to administration and maintenance to allow access controls to be effective and up-to-date. These efforts have the potential of becoming a stumbling block to productivity because tightening access may throttle workflows and bring business operations to a halt.Lastly, while zero trust is for enhancing security, it also has certain risks such as possible attacks on trust brokers, attacks on local physical devices, potential for user credentials to be compromised, focused attacks on zero-trust admin account credentials, and more.
CIO INFLUENCE: CIO Influence Interview with Bill Lobig, VP of Product Management at IBM Automation
Meanwhile, organisations that are focused on the development of cybersecurity products can join and collaborate with EarlyBirds. Innovator companies, whether they are a start-up, scale-up or mature organisation, can join the platform and claim and update their profile to help find users and customers for their new products.
The EarlyBirds open innovation ecosystem can help businesses and other organisations in technology improvement initiatives, such as adopting a zero trust policy, by exposing them to the latest innovations through collaborations with innovators and SMEs.The system has two main elements.One is the Explorer program that has the purpose of accelerating the process of technological innovation for the organisation as a service.The Explorer program has a number of features, such as: a focus on particular types of innovations; quarterly and monthly innovation days; weekly webinars to help stimulate innovation in the organisation; a nominated SME for the business; and a platform enterprise license.The second element is the Challenger program, which is for organisations that want to focus on a specific problem or opportunity..
Meanwhile, they have also developed the EarlyBirds Cyber Security Innovation Map, that Early Adopter organisations may utilise to speed up technology advancement in cybersecurity, such as adopting and applying the zero trust policy. Mapping innovation is the process of collecting and evaluating information regarding the external and internal factors affecting innovation. This means this is an ongoing process. This allows for a comprehensive and clear view of a company’s innovation ecosystem, which makes it easier to identify potential collaborators and partners.
CIO INFLUENCE: CIO Influence Interview with Antoine Jebara, Co-Founder and GM, MSP Products at JumpCloud
[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]
