The world has changed significantly since the days of the on-premises-only enterprise of 30 years ago. While a defensive network perimeter composed of legacy appliances like firewalls was once sufficient for keeping data safe, this is no longer the case. Today, the standard enterprise IT ecosystem looks significantly different and no longer revolves around the data center.
While remote work had already been increasing in prevalence for years, the global pandemic rapidly accelerated its adoption. As a result, employees now work remotely more often than they do on-premises for the vast majority of organizations. Similarly, applications themselves have left the building. With the rise of software-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, most applications in use are now cloud applications built and maintained by third parties (or just built upon third-party infrastructure). Additionally, rather than a private connection, transactions between remote users and cloud resources are facilitated by the public internet and typically occur within encrypted traffic (where IT can struggle to gain visibility and control over data).
So, as mentioned previously, this evolution in the IT ecosystem means that the legacy approach to data protection is no longer sufficient. Tying security to the data center makes no sense when data is primarily being uploaded, downloaded, and accessed off-premises. Attempting to backhaul traffic to the data center for data protection only serves to impede performance, user experience, and security itself.
Curious to know how this all plays out in the real world? In the video below, you can learn more about the data protection challenges that modern organizations are facing—as well as how your enterprise can best respond. The video contains a conversation between cybersecurity experts and includes commentary on the results of Zscaler’s recent Data@Risk report, a data protection survey with findings from hundreds of organizations around the world and across industries.
To see how Zscaler can protect your organization’s data, check out our demos on out-of-band CASB, exact data match, shadow IT discovery, and much more. Or, download our Top CASB Use Cases ebook.
