Fortune Barnard Anyovi, Director of Digital Security at Virgin Media O2, shares how our modern, user-centric approach to security is key to our digital transformation and delivering a winning formula for our customers and colleagues.

Digital security is bringing a modern way of doing security into our organisation, and it’s exciting. I started my journey over 25 years ago and now I’m embracing a different way of doing things. It’s transformative, it’s user-focused and it’s challenging.

People think there’s a dichotomy between speed and security. It’s not true. In digital transformation, speed, trust, and experience are the winning formula.

I’ve learned that you may have one of the best products out there with a fantastic experience for the users, but if it is not trusted, it will not be adopted by our customers.

This is why, as a team, we realise trust is key in everything we do. Security should be the trust and the product differentiator as we go through this digital transformation — enabling the organisation, driving growth and innovation and ensuring the viability of our products in the market.

As we become a digital Telco, as we upgrade the rest of the UK, we need our platforms to move at the speed of light to achieve our objectives.

In the past, security has meant pain. As a collective, we knew that needed to change this, quickly. We love our users and if it’s too difficult for them, we won’t do it.

The path to production should be the easiest, yet the most secure for our users and our developers, our engineers. It’s such an exciting time to work within the security department because as we move at speed, we’re baking security into our design and creating networks of security champions throughout our organisation.

What I’m loving about the way we’re reimagining security is that we’re making it frictionless and user-centric, for our customers and colleagues — bringing in things like password-less authentication, technical controls to address phishing attacks, and moving away from one-size-fits-all security training.

As we go through digital transformation, we have legacy systems we must address. It’s an opportunity to upgrade our securities — leveraging new technology, AI, machine learning and automation.

It’s our challenge, but at the same time, it’s an opportunity for us. Another challenge is attracting the right talent.

Modern security is a field that demands continuous learning. To do that, we need more people in the nursery with a growth mindset.

We need to shift from know it all, to learn it all. We’re a team that thrives on fresh perspectives. We’re ready for people looking to make an impact. Yes, it’s difficult to learn on a daily basis. It’s tiring, but it’s exciting and it’s the only way we will win in this market. It’s a different kind of security. Let’s go on this journey together.