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Not long back in my professional career, I have seen a time when the most common complaint of enterprise IT heads was the lack of realization from their top management about the value technology could bring to business. That has most definitely changed, and all of us are just too familiar with the change. Among other reasons, it was because the CIOs learnt to speak the language that business speaks; the vendors realized that it is not enough to market to the IT decision makers and they should target the functional heads too (and they did) and most importantly, industry and multilateral forums like World Economic Forum continuously pitched that the future of business was digital. And the result is: today, emerging technologies and ideas are being looked at with a proactive stance: what can it do for us?
Very often, the answers are superficial. But the action that gets taken on them are real. In simple words, you can call them herd mentality. Just because everyone is doing it, there must be something good about it. Some even go a step further. Instead of looking at ‘how’ it can be done, they just replicate what others are doing so that they can implement it in ‘record time’. Just think about how many such statements, social media boasts that you get along similar lines.
In the ITNEXT April 2021 Cover Story, our ‘not-so-new, new Associate Editor, Jatinder Singh, takes on one such hyped idea – Zero Trust in security. Jatinder was in the founding team of ITNEXT and has re-joined us in April 2021. In the story, he does not just examine where Zero Trust fits in the organization, but also cautions against jumping onto the bandwagon without being adequately prepared or taking decisions based on the view of the organization’s challenges through someone else’s lenses. I hope it will be useful for anyone serious about undertaking the Zero Trust journey. It is neither an implementation guide nor an update on what is latest in Zero Trust. Rather, it tries to sensitize you to ask some questions to yourself—and of course, convince yourself.
As I am writing this, the second big wave of COVID-19 pandemic has manifested itself and the news is not exactly good. But this is the time we need each other. This is the time the world will turn to technology with a lot of hope. We must keep hope to show and ensure hope for others.
All the best.
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