Maarten Bevers is one of the speakers at IDnext ’21. He is an Information Security Officer at Leaseplan with a specialism in IAM, with experience in global enterprises. Coming from a background of general safety & security management and predictive profiling/crowd control.
In a short interview Maarten tells us about his biggest identity challenge during the Covid waves, what changes where made in his organization and what was the biggest lesson learned.
What was your biggest identity challenge during the first covid wave?
The biggest challenge was to ensure ongoing collaboration between both national and international colleagues. Traditionally we were used to close local collaboration and regular workshops with the broader international population. Due to COVID we had to work in a completely different way, both from a technological point of view, as well as an organizational point of view. The different entities were no longer separate identities, but we all had to work together as 1 big team, making the global team feel like a smaller and closer team than ever before.
Was the challenge the same during the second wave?
No, this was no longer a challenge, but the new way of working. By the second wave, the technological changes were implemented in a record time, to ensure everyone could work.
What are the biggest changes in your organization?
As mentioned before, the way of working was the biggest change. Arguably not the technological change, but the way we interact with each other. Before local entities would collaborate closer with each other, whereas now we noticed that borders were evaporating and expertise levels where working closer with each other, independent of their geological location. Since we haven’t been back to the office like before, it is hard to say if this will be a permanent change in the way we work, yet it definitely was a big change.
What was the biggest lesson learned?
Before December 2019 we always had discussions on the benefits of Cloud and ‘work from anywhere’ type of solutions. After COVID, this is no longer a question, but a must have. I am happy my organization at the time was already ahead of the curve. If we would have had everything on premise, COVID would have been an even bigger challenge then it already was.
