Every company is a technology company. Every company is a software company. Every company is a media company. We’ve all heard these maxims from tech leaders ranging from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to tech journalist Tom Foremski that describe how modern businesses need to adapt to remain relevant. But there is a new truism on the horizon that is quickly moving to the top of the list:every company is a security company.
“If you look at enterprises, the majority of them haven't moved their entire workloads to the cloud because it’s hard to trust putting your data and your customers' data in somebody else's hands, even though they want to reduce their IT expenditure and to gain more agility,” said Ben Ravani, Senior Vice President of Reliability Engineering at Nutanix.
[Listen to the audio Podcast: Ben Ravani: Data Security is Everyone’s Responsibility]
According to a 2019 Cloud Usage Report by Nutanix, businesses are increasingly adopting cloud services, ranging from 10 for a standard cloud business customer to 30 services for an enterprise cloud customer. While this shows more companies rely more heavily on public cloud services, Ravani said security remains mission-critical regardless of whether IT departments use public, private or hybrid cloud systems.
With the average cost of a data breach for a company now at $3.8 million and the emergence of regulations like GDPR and the CCPA, businesses have more than customer distrust to contend with if their data is not properly safeguarded.
“Without security, you have nothing,” Ravani said.
Security is the Top Priority
Ravani has spent more than 20 years engineering data systems. At Microsoft, he led efforts behind Windows Live and helped build computing systems that powered Messenger and Hotmail, which grew at breakneck speed and required rapid scaling to meet unprecedented data demands. Now with Nutanix, he’s building Xi Cloud Service, which allows businesses to run IT applications seamlessly across different platforms. Through it all, Ravani has learned that trust is the foundation for customer success.
“This is a lifetime opportunity to bring what I’ve learned from years of building B2C and B2B services at places like Microsoft and Salesforce to build a trusted cloud at Nutanix,” Ravani said.