Digitisation to grow despite security risks, says Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora

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The pandemic has invariably shown us that every company, bar a few, is essentially a tech company, said Nikesh Arora, Chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, in an interview with CNBC-TV 18 on October 19.

The former SoftBank executive and current Palo Alto Networks CEO encouraged businesses to embrace digital transformation and transformation to the cloud.

"Traditional business vanished because the zero-touch environment and technology came to the rescue," he added. Arora said the COVID-19 pandemic enabled a technology-reliant society across the globe. This, however, also expands the risk of security hacks, he said.

The acceleration of technology and digitisation is not stopping even after the pandemic. "This is the new normal. It has exposed the cracks that people have from a cybersecurity perspective," he says.

"Everyone has accelerated plans for digital transformation, cloud transformation. Security is coupled with transformation because in any industry, if your systems don't recover, you will be shut down," he said.

He however doesn't think people are going to reprioritise technology adoption. "Governments around the world were pumping money into the economy because we believe we were dealing with a pandemic. That was the biggest shock to the system. We all thought the only way to write it out was to take the uncertainty of the pandemic away by making all the other uncertainty go away,” he said, adding that managing COVID created economic risks for the future.