Global connectivity has meant that, more than ever before, South Africa is a part of the global village – and while that certainly comes with myriad benefits, it also comes with the need for an increased focus on cyber security for the state, enterprises, and home users too.
By Carlo Bolzonello, country manager for McAfee in South Africa
With the move to the cloud gaining momentum in the worldwide shift to remote working in 2020 and 2021, the convenience of work from anywhere – wherever you are – has been coloured with a 630 percent increase in cyberthreats targeting cloud services. Increased cloud usage also means that data is flowing beyond the reach of traditional network protection, creating a significant risk that private data could be obtained by malevolent actors via unsecure or untrusted cloud services or home devices.
In addition to increasingly wily attackers, security operations centres (SOCs) – globally and in South Africa – are still maturing and face three key challenges: reactive processes and workflows; alert fatigue and fragmented tools; and limited staff and expertise. Furthermore, many SOCs have, over the years, accumulated a variety of security tools, all reporting different types of events – but causing complexity and chaos in a crisis, rather than being able to provide a single source of clear insights that inform a quick and effective solution.
The tendency, unfortunately, is to focus too much attention on the origin of a threat or an attack, rather than on its economic impact, how that can be reduced, and being sure of a return on investment in cyber defences. Cybercrime is just an evolution of traditional crime, and has a direct impact on economic growth, jobs, innovation, and investment – at a time when the country can ill afford any distractions or disruptions from its focus on transformation and recovery.
While some environments, like transport, aerospace and banking, are certainly more vulnerable than others to cybercrime attacks, every company is at risk to any intellectual property theft that could give the malicious actor the information they need to compete with another enterprise or country. South African businesses should be turning to a unified data and threat protection solution like McAfee’s MVision Unified Cloud Edge, which covers all potential data leak vectors, including endpoint, unsanctioned shadow IT apps, sanctioned apps (including email) and cloud to cloud transfers. It’s managed via a single console and uses the same DLP technology everywhere.