Marius Agenbag

Today’s consumers are spoiled for choice with a range of competing brands only a mouse-click away. Adding to this, a consequence of the pandemic is that customer journeys are being rapidly accelerated into the digital age.

Therefore, in order to remain relevant among competitors, customer journeys must present the best possible experience to their consumers while maintaining trust through sound security practices.

So says Marius Agenbag, MD, Altron Security, a silver sponsor of the ITWeb Security Summit 2020, to be held as a virtual event from 25 to 28 August.

“Balancing customer experience with security and trust is a momentous challenge to most businesses but once addressed successfully, delivers a true competitive edge and therefore not be approached lightly,” he adds.

Speaking of what he sees as being the biggest security trend in 2020, Agenbag says identity is the new perimeter. “Everything ranging from zero trust to work from home and customer experience can be enabled through the solid foundation that can be created by securing digital identities.”

In terms of how the security landscape will evolve over the next five years, he says: “As coined by Gartner in 2020, continuous adaptive risk and trust assessment (CARTA) is the application of intelligent security controls in the right place at the right time through the application of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and data to inform risk-based decisions.”

According to him, this concept will be the primary driver of all security controls as they adapt to an elastic cloud-based IT infrastructure.

Offering a piece of advice around cyber security, he says: “Create business value. Security is now so pervasive across IT, that it is imperative that cyber security leaders reinvent themselves to find new ways to empower the organisation.”

Security must be recognised as a platform through which innovation, agility and speed-to-market can be achieved safely, Agenbag ends.