The scope of IT managers’ roles is growing from a security and device management
standpoint. Brian Kenyon, Founding Team Member & Chief Strategy Officer at Island,
joined Tyler Kern to talk about the need for collaboration, technology, and software to
handle the challenges of today’s IT manager.
Island is a cybersecurity company focused on helping organizations deliver last-mile
controls to one of the most widely deployed applications: the web browser. “What
Island’s done is built a browser built on the foundation of Chrome and Edge, and the
other modern browsers out there,” Kenyon said. “But it’s purposely designed to
integrate with the security and IT stack of the enterprise.”

Certainly, technological advancements have something to do with the expanding scope of
IT managers. Still, the pandemic played a significant part in the shift, with the added
importance of connecting workers in a secure, remote environment and more connected
devices. “It used to be the standard that you’d show up to work; they’d hand you Think
Pad, hand you a Dell, or maybe a Microsoft Surface; it would be configured for you. All
you had to do was log in, and things would start to work,” Kenyon said. But over the
past several years, workers wanted to access more devices even before the pandemic.
“As we started contemplating how we would bring these devices into our environment,
Covid happened.”

The pandemic posed not just a remote work security concern for IT managers, but a
new complexity got added to the mix: collaboration devices. From video conferencing
tools to other interactive collaboration solutions, IT managers had their hands full
figuring out how to get everyone connected and secure. Kenyon said virtual
collaboration is an exciting challenge in terms of security. Zoom conferences are one
such example, where when a company isn’t hosting the Zoom conference, they lose
control over the settings and the security. “Those are things we all very quickly learned,”
Kenyon said. “As many organizations thought they had that locked down, and then
someone says, yeah, but the other company’s hosting, and that’s how the data got out.”

Author: Tyler Kern

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