In the last year we’ve seen cloud migrations explode as companies rushed digital transformation projects to meet changing business demands brought on by the pandemic, and in many cases, at the expense of security.

Julie Talbot-Hubbard, senior vice president of Cyber Protection and Identity at Optiv, No. 26 on the 2020 CRN Solution Provider 500, talks about some of the challenges companies face in today’s COVID-driven digital workplace as companies work to secure their new digital footprint.

“If we look back to last May, last June, it was all hands on deck to really help our clients, working with our partners on how do we enable users to work remotely, store their data in the cloud, you know just work very mobile and agile,” said Talbot-Hubbard. “Now fast forward to where we are now… now we know that’s more of a permanent nature and we’re trying to make sure we have the right controls in place, the right visibility, the right technology, working with our partners to ensure organizations have compliance, all of that across [multi-cloud environments].”

Talbot-Hubbard told CRNtv, partners are also discovering a new problem: there are no effective tools for managing identities across multiple clouds.

“Now [organizations] are distributed across a hybrid-cloud environment, so their perimeter has changed,” which calls for a new cybersecurity strategy centered around identity and access management (IAM) said Talbot-Hubbard.

And why she’s calling on IAM technology vendors and cloud platform vendors to leverage partnerships, processes and technology across the cybersecurity life cycle “to be able to provide that full visibility and integration into identities and entitlements.”

“Think about today, it’s not just on human IDs, think about that machine element as well and how quickly we’re ramping up you know from a cloud infrastructure standability and tearing it down, all of those machines or infrastructure have an identity,” Talbot-Hubbard said. “And so ensuring that we’ve got the right technologies that can integrate with these cloud partners is going to be really critical to help clients and customers secure their environment.”

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