The Growing Scope of IT Managers

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, technology 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.”