Why Make Data the Center of Your Security Strategy?
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CRE
An unprecedented pandemic, supply chain issues, economic uncertainties, and more – in the face of challenges, the CRE sector continues to adapt.
Recently, CREW (Commercial Real Estate Women) Network published an industry research paper entitled “Building the CRE Workforce of the Future.” With survey responses from some 1,200 CRE professionals across five countries, the paper yields insights into the industry’s present state – and is useful in preparing and building for the future. The paper – and its related webinar – focuses in on topics like mentorship, navigating the geo-political realm as a female, hybrid work, new hiring tactics, and more.
Some things of note? While flexible workspaces prove important, there’s a strong case to be made for the ability to interact with colleagues face-to-face, in person. Having the chance to engage with internal connections – whether it be your boss, colleagues, a mentor, etc. – at the office is valuable in ways that may transcend face-value productivity or output, alone. Hybrid models can enable employees to reap the benefits of in-person engagement, while simultaneously baking in the flexibility of remote work. When it comes to diversity and inclusion, conducting equal pay assessments, implementing more flexible work policies, and actively recruiting more underrepresented people and females into the workforce may bring positive results.
While Commercial Property Executive’s article provides some intel, we encourage all CRE professionals to read through CREW Network’s 2022 industry research paper, in full. You can view and download “Building the CRE Workforce of the Future,” here.
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Tech
The classic model of cybersecurity? Three words: “castle and moat.” Unfamiliar? Simply put, castle and moat entails access for internally-trusted users, while simultaneously restricting external access. Yet, monumental data breaches and victorious cyber attackers expose the castle and moat strategy as unreliable. Moreover, it’s misplaced – hackers want your data, not your castle…and those hackers could already be within your castle.
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Medieval architecture metaphor aside, Forbes asserts that data is your company’s most valuable asset – and we tend to agree. With workloads transitioning into the cloud, it’s critical that your security teams have complete – 100% – visibility into where data lives and make sure it’s protected at all times.
Forbes provides six reasons to seriously consider positioning data at the center of security strategy (note that these are not listed in order of importance and that the article provides more context into what each reason means). First, CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) brings an explosion of deployments and new changes. Second, AI/ML (artificial intelligence/machine learning) fuels the need for more access to data for modeling. Third, microservices drive more services and granular data access. Fourth, data proliferation brings more copies into more places. Fifth, reliance on a cloud infrastructure suffers when data access is misconfigured. Sixth and lastly, privacy regulations require more control and tracking of data.
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Work Culture
Neuroscience and psychology reveal that “context switching” – that is, jumping between tasks – proves cognitively taxing. As the article’s authors note, toggling between two (or more) digital applications amounts to context switching. Causing the production of cortisol (read: the stress hormone) to rise, excessive toggling makes it more difficult to focus and slows us down. So, what happens when context switching is a daily, widespread reality in the workplace – and, how do all these wasted moments add up?
To assess how much time and energy the toggling tax exhausts, the article’s authors executed a ground-up measurement focused on the cognitive effort cost of switching. Leveraging a work graph, the authors “studied 20 teams, totaling 137 users, across three Fortune 500 companies up to five weeks, for a data set of 3,200 days of work.” Their findings? Specific to the dataset above, the average cost of a switch clocked in at a bit over two seconds – and the average user toggled between various websites and apps almost 1,200 times a day. If you do the math, these users burned up four hours reorienting themselves (after toggling to a new app) a week. This translates to five working weeks or 9% of the users’ total time at work, a year.
Some may say this is the cost of doing business in the digital era. No – a single app will never be able to do everything, meet all functional needs, and cater to every job-specific demand, across the workforce. Yes – as the authors attest, managers and leaders can do some things to alleviate the “toggle tax” and its effects. Managers must understand that “throwing people at the problem” – and simply hiring more workers – does not constitute a solution. They can investigate spots where the design of work produces friction. They may choose to rebalance workloads. Leaders (think C-suite executives and more) can “rationalize the cost of introducing new applications in the landscape.” In addition, they have the power to lead with both user experience and centricity, and can commit to constructing – and actively maintaining – a company work graph.
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