Tag: cyber attack

Most African business leaders are more optimistic about the strength of the global economy and their organisations’ ability to grow revenues in the next 12 months than they were a year ago. Although CEOs’ confidence in their own company’s revenue prospects has rebounded, they are anxious, too: policy uncertainty, tax policy, cyber threats and over-regulation are keeping them awake at night.

The normalisation of remote working and increased business adoption of cloud technologies have significantly increased the cyberattack surface putting every company at risk of compromise. With more than 10% of internet user computers worldwide experiencing at least one malware-class attack last year and Kaspersky solutions blocking over 665 million attacks launched from online resources in various countries, cybersecurity skills are now more in demand than ever.

While digital transformation and the move to the connected enterprise offer brilliant benefits to organisations, improved visualisation, better and faster data acquisition and processing, remote support, and informed decision-making, there is industry-wide concern that the 'smart' enterprise is increasingly vulnerable.

Cybersecurity for small business has come to the fore as more Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) shifted towards digitalisation to survive in the unstable by COVID-19 circumstances. Yet, shockingly, according to research from IBM and the Ponemon Institute released in 2020, a whopping two out of five companies in the United States and the United Kingdom with 50 or fewer employees do not have any type of cybersecurity defence plan in place.

Data protection challenges are undermining organisations’ abilities to execute digital transformation initiatives globally, according to the Data Protection Report 2021, which has found that 58% of backups fail, leaving data unprotected.

Recent global events, specifically the global COVID-19 pandemic, have caused widespread business disruption and transformation, forcing businesses to adapt to new ways of working in an extremely short period.

Insurance is a mature and historically stable industry, operating on established, reliable business strategies and methods. However, when digital technology really began to take hold with consumers, it upended traditional insurance models.

In the recent months, cyber attacks have risen to become one of the biggest threats to the digital health of corporations – with even the most heavily protected businesses becoming vulnerable to data theft.  According to research by Kaspersky, Africa has faced ‘millions of cyber attacks’ in 2020.

According to our new report, ‘How businesses can minimise the cost of a data breach’, enterprises in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) that decide to voluntarily inform their stakeholders and the public about a breach, on average, are likely to lose 38% less than their peers that saw the incident leaked to the media. The same tendency has also been found to be the case in SMBs.

The national lockdown forced a large contingency of the South African workforce to work from home and as it is somewhat of a new notion, it had its fair share of challenges. Yet recent studies have shown the shift to remote working has led to improved productivity for 29% of organisations.