Crossing the Digital Chasm: Securing the Legacy of Forced Transformation

Author name: Joe Sambuco

The COVID-19 lockdowns didn’t just change the world; they forced a generation of businesses across the most daunting chasm they’d ever faced. As someone who has spent years guiding traditional, brick-and-mortar companies through digital transformation, I watched in real-time as the Technology Adoption Lifecycle, a model that typically unfolds over years, was compressed into a number of weeks to keep the busines lights on.

Forget the Innovators and Early Adopters. In March 2020, the entire Late Majority and even a significant portion of the Laggards were thrust into the future. This wasn’t a strategic, planned adoption. It was a desperate leap for survival. Companies that had never enabled a remote workforce were suddenly all-in on the cloud. Family-owned restaurants became e-commerce sites overnight. The chasm wasn’t crossed; it was pole-vaulted in a blind panic.

This forced adoption wasn’t about achieving a high technology readiness level, a measure of technical maturity. It was about achieving a business continuity level. The question wasn’t “Is this solution perfect?” It was “Does this solution work right now?”

And it worked. It kept the lights on.

But what about now? As we settle into this new digital-normal, we are facing the security debt of that frantic transition. The very companies that made this heroic leap are now the most vulnerable targets in our new threat landscape.

The Security Impact of a Leap, Not a Journey

When you cross the chasm strategically, you build guardrails. When you are thrown across it, you forget to look down. The security impacts of this forced adoption are now becoming clear:

1. Shadow IT became Standard Operating Procedure: Employees downloaded unsanctioned collaboration tools to get work done. IT departments, overwhelmed, often retroactively approved them, creating a massive, unmanaged attack surface.
2. Configuration Over Speed: The mantra was “enable access.” Security configurations for cloud services (S3 buckets, SaaS settings) were often left at default, which could be wide open. Speed triumphed over security.
3. The Perimeter Vanished Instantly: The concept of a corporate network firewall protecting everyone inside became obsolete overnight. The new perimeter is identity, and many organizations had no mature Identity and Access Management (IAM) strategy to handle it.

The legacy of the lockdown isn’t just that we use more tech; it’s that an entire segment of the economy was forced to adopt advanced technology without the security maturity that should have accompanied it within some companies.

The Way Forward: Securing the Late Majority

So, how do we secure this new normal? The answer lies in leveraging data to create a security posture that is as dynamic and adaptive as the threat landscape itself. We must use the tools that enabled the transformation to now secure it.

Use Data Proactively - Building the Guardrails

For organizations that were thrust into the digital world, proactive security is about creating the foundational guardrails these companies never had time to build.

• Attack Surface Management: Use data to continuously discover and map every digital asset. For a company that rapidly spun up new cloud instances and websites, simply knowing what they own is the first critical step. Data-driven discovery tools can find shadow IT, misconfigured services, and unknown assets, allowing teams to finally inventory and secure their new digital estate.
• Threat Intelligence Integration: Proactively block known threats at the edge. This is a force multiplier for teams that may lack deep security expertise. Feeding data from threat intelligence feeds into firewalls and email gateways automatically blocks traffic from malicious IPs and domains, providing a critical layer of protection.

Use Data for Detection - Seeing in the Dark

When your perimeter is everywhere, you need a new way to see threats. This is where behavioral data becomes non-negotiable.

• User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA): This is the ultimate tool for securing a fractured perimeter. UEBA doesn’t assume a “trusted internal network.” Instead, it uses machine learning on data from cloud logs, VPNs, and authentication servers to learn every user’s normal behavior.

  • The “hmm factor”
    • Did the accounts payable employee who only accesses the internal accounting system suddenly start trying to access R&D servers at 2 AM?

    • Did a user’s login session originate from a new country just 30 minutes after their last login which was not the same country?

      This data-driven approach is perfect for identifying compromised credentials and insider threats within the complex digital environments born from the lockdown scramble.

• Deception Technology: For companies with a brand-new and unfamiliar digital footprint, deception tech is a highly effective tripwire. Planting fake files, fake databases, and fake servers generates high-fidelity alerts. Any interaction with these honeypots is, by definition, malicious, immediately flagging an intruder who is exploring the network.

Conclusion: From Forged in Crisis to Fortified for the Future

The businesses that crossed the digital chasm in 2020 displayed incredible resilience and agility. They saved their companies and kept the economy moving. Now, the next phase of that journey begins: moving from being forged in crisis to being fortified for the future.

The goal is no longer just business continuity; it’s business resilience. By embracing a data-driven security strategy, one that focuses on proactive discovery and behavioral detection, we can help the Late Majority secure the digital ground they so courageously captured. We can build the guardrails they didn’t have time to build, allowing them to not just survive their digital transformation, but to thrive within it, securely.