Parenting, festivals and… identity management?! The inevitability of change…
There are many similarities between raising a child and building a business for the future. A good CISO, like a good parent, will do everything they can to prepare their charges for an opportunity-rich but potentially dangerous world.
Over the weekend, former English rugby player turned commentator, Brian Moore, tweeted about his daughter camping at BoardMasters Festival in Cornwall. I’ve had a similar weekend to Brian, worrying about my 17-year-old’s attendance at that same festival. Of course, I want her to go, have fun and be a happy independent person, but an underlying fear grips me about all the bad things that could happen.
According to my wife and daughters, having fun and developing independence cannot be achieved by staying at home and streaming music. I had considered staying in Newquay myself, or a health wearable for my daughter to alert me of impending doom. These, and many other suggestions I made, were discounted by the family, and so off she went with her friends into the big wide world.
Like Brian, a text arrived that made me very happy. My independent young woman was fine, having a great time and my fears were (mostly) unfounded. Brian, you are right, that is special.
But what does all this have to do with identity management? Well, both as a parent and as a business owner, there comes a point where change is unavoidable - sometimes you plan for it, but sometimes it’s thrust upon you. Your choices are to either adapt and be a part of the future or remain the same and get left behind. That’s when it pays to have the right foundations in place so that when change comes knocking, you’re ready for it.
My main parenting job has been to do the worrying (turns out I’m good at it), and, like a good CISO, I’ve been imagining every terrible possibility or potential outcome. But, like your children, you can’t completely shelter your organisation from the world - you just need to prepare them to engage in it, so that they can successfully negotiate any problems and enjoy all the amazing possibilities.
We support our customers in preparing for the changing demands of the world of mobility and cloud. This is about providing the control to liberate. When you know who has access to what, and are confident that your data and your customer data is safe, then you have the ability to work creatively, collaboratively and flexibly. Given the security perimeter strategy is no longer valid, security needs to be more appropriate for the new business demands driven by cloud and mobile working. The underlying control that makes that possible is a properly implemented identity solution. Which, fortunately, we know a little bit about from our last 16 years in the field.
A good identity solution that includes identity and access management and governance will enable your organisation to respond to new demands: Securely create new users, distribute credentials, provide single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, employee access, business to business access, and lots more. That’s a huge amount of functionality and security, all built on a solid foundation of Azure AD, our cloud identity service of choice. You can then become the cool parent/CISO!
Taking those steps from child to adult is very much like breaking that old security perimeter down. If you have done your job well (with a few hiccups and lessons learned such as ‘you can’t clean your teeth with a cactus’), you’ll provide good foundations for a successful transition which may even be fun! However, if you try and stop this important transition, then it will, like shadow IT, find its own way in - and leave you out in the cold.
So, unless you want your HR team sneaking off to Glastonbury, you may need to find a way to accelerate and enable their new cloud HR system (or is that HCM).
If you don’t want 50,000 people setting up tents because they need Workday accounts, you’ll need an agile way to create those accounts and safely distribute credentials, allowing access without having them all turn up at the office or the service desk.
If you remain an immovable parent or CISO that just says no, then, like Jurassic Park, nature will most certainly find a way.
Join us in October at our annual Identity, Access and Security Summit where we’ll have two days of industry leading speakers bringing you the latest developments in the identity space. We can help you put the right components in place so you can be the cool responsive CISO who can say yes to new business demands.
As for parenting I am still learning and going greyer day by day!