Cybersecurity Festival Day One: CISO tales in the new normal

How was the coronavirus pandemic like Netflix?

Netflix was a quiet success story of 2020. Although already well-established, the company leveraged the cloud to scale farther and faster than ever, as demand spiked in the first half of the year.

Check Point Technologies used the cloud for the same thing, but also tackled the more pressing challenge of moving 100 per cent of its staff to remote working. CISO Jony Fischbein spoke about the project at the first day of the inaugural Cybersecurity Festival, describing five key areas the company looked at in the process (in the style of Netflix film and series titles, of course).

The first area, Homecoming, covered the challenge of moving 5,000 people to a remote work environment. In the second area, Cyber Fist, Fischbein described how he and his team worked to combat threat actors who set out to exploit the remote working environment. As part of this they introduced the third area, New Guard; VPNs and allowing remote office access from home.

The fourth area, Project Power Scale, looked at how to sustain scalability with a remote workforce; and the fifth area, Compliance: Law and Order, discussed how to remain compliant with various legal regulations without direct control over employees.

It wasn't all about a retrospective look at 2020, though; attendees also heard about Check Point's cybersecurity operation model for 2021. To get a deeper insight into the session, watch the video above.