Over one-third (39%) of geographically distributed companies in the Middle East, Turkiye and Africa (META) region identify building and maintaining a cohesive IT infrastructure across multiple sites as their primary concern, according to a new Kaspersky survey.
At the same time, 23% of businesses surveyed consider ensuring comprehensive information protection of all their offices the most significant challenge.
The recent Kaspersky report “Managing geographically distributed businesses: Challenges and solutions” provides a deeper insight into the network and information security challenges faced by geo-distributed companies and highlights solutions organisations employ to overcome these difficulties.
According to the report, the majority of respondents in the META region clearly prioritised technological aspects when referring to the main challenges they face while operating geo-distributed companies.
Among those surveyed, 39% said that building and maintaining a coherent IT infrastructure
When considering IT infrastructure and information security issues, it is notable that 40% of experts identify incident detection and response as a primary hurdle when addressing cybersecurity issues across multiple sites. More than one-third struggle with effectively implementing security measures (37%) and building a cohesive security policy (37%).
Among other technological problems respondents also mentioned were the set-up and integration of new sites into the existing network, the high costs of hiring IT personnel, a disparate suite of security management tools and longer recovery times after system failures.
“The figures from our research show that providing consistent network and information security across multiple geographically dispersed offices is a daunting task for distributed organisations,” comments Maxim Kaminsky, business development manager of secure access service edge (SASE) at Kaspersky.
“Local regulation and legislation, varying resources and expertise at corporate headquarters and branch offices, coupled with a lack of effective network and cybersecurity tools, can place a significant burden on those specialists trying to implement and maintain uniform security standards and consistent network configuration.
“To address this challenge, companies should apply solutions that enable centralised and automated network management and provide comprehensive protection of all offices, regardless of their location.”