Tag: cybersecurity

This has been a year of disruption, confusion and now a new ‘normal’. COVID-19 is here for the foreseeable future, and that means humans need to adapt to new circumstances like Working from Home (WFH). Almost every industry has embraced this as an effective way of keeping staff safe, remaining operational and controlling costs during global economic downturn.

2020 has seen more people speaking of 'resilience' than ever before. While some organisations are well underway on their resilience journeys, others still ponder what resilience really means and how to start building it. Amidst global economic pressures, many organisations do not have the funds, resources and time available to develop and implement comprehensive programmes to enhance resilience.

Up until a few years ago, digital transformation was not high on the agenda for most finance chiefs. Though they recognised that IT was important, most CFOs thought of digital as a technology play, a channel strategy or a customer experience concern.

Our latest findings on State of Cyber Resilience shows that cyberattacks on insurers have more than doubled (from 240 to 519 attacks, on average), illustrating the current cyber climate for insurers: It’s volatile. This number is more than twice as much as the cross-industry cyber resilience leaders in the survey and over three times more than their banking peers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is maturing rapidly as an incredibly powerful technology with seemingly limitless application. It has demonstrated its ability to automate routine tasks, such as our daily commute, while also augmenting human capacity with new insight.

In a dynamic, connected environment where sensitive customer data is highly attractive to hackers and forms the lifeblood of the business, facing a cyber-attack is no longer a case of 'if', but 'when'. Of greater concern is how to minimise the impact on their business and on customer trust.

It is commonly understood that security – or specifically cybersecurity in the modern-day organisation – is everyone’s responsibility, but what does that mean?In the same way as fiscal discipline is managed today, security can and should be connected to the very fabric of the business.

South Africa’s telecommunications (telcos) companies need to rapidly evolve by adding additional services for a new mobile working and learning world in order to stay relevant and profitable.  Their legacy business model of telcos which has long sold data and SMS packages to consumers, is no longer enough on its own - a fact that has been brought into stark relief throughout the lockdown period. 

At the core of our work and social lives, connectivity and online functions like email, e-commerce, apps, and instant messaging, seem to dominate everything we do in the modern world. Made even more apparent by the lockdown and its restrictions, few businesses can trade effectively without connectivity, and a reliable data network has become a must-have for all businesses, regardless of size or sector.

Renewed emphasis on digitalisation as a key strategy for sustainability is placing pressure on CIOs to ensure corporate systems are resilient. One certainty that has emerged from the COVID-19 crisis is that organisations embarking on digitalisation were better prepared to respond to the crisis.