South African businesses have seen a massive mentality shift towards cybersecurity over the last few years. Global threats, digitalisation, metaverse era, the overall shift to remote workforces has made them more vulnerable and increased exposure to the cyber world and the threats that come with it. With South Africaโs skill shortage in cybersecurity, businesses have looked to cybersecurity companies to partner up with, because gone are the days when cybersecurity could be seen as a luxury โ its quickly becoming an essential. Nclose has seen tremendous growth over the last few years as a result of this culture and mentality change. We interviewed a couple of our leaders have shared below why.
Stephen Osler, Ncloseโs Co-founder and Business Director
Question 1: What has changed?
- โThe catastrophic nature of these cyber events is becoming real and more frequent. These events are not only relevant to the IT operations members of businesses but also to the board leaders of South African businesses who acknowledge these events as serious risks to business operations.โ
Question 2: How have businesses adapted?
- โBusiness are now understanding itโs not a matter of if you will be compromised but rather when you will be compromised, because it only becomes a matter of time when you become a target. Boards are now justifying investment into cybersecurity as an essential business requirement.โ
Question 3: Contributing factors?
- โAn interesting fact about South Africa, is according to a report released by Interpol in Q1 2021 โ South Africa was one of the highest countries in the world to be targeted with ransomware. Covid has caused quite a digital transformation for South African businesses, and because of this digital transformation the adoption of cloud services and infrastructure has increased, and inherently so has the attack footprint for cybercriminals to exploit.โ
Question 4: Challenges being faced?
- โA challenged is people are looking at technology to try and mitigate the brain drain that South Africa has seem to have fallen victim to over the last few decades. There is already a skills shortage within the cybersecurity industry in South Africa so technology acquisition could see that mitigated to some extent. The other issue with the brain drain, is you get highly qualified individuals in the industry leaving to perceived greener pastures and not enough qualified people to fill the gaps they have left.โ
Question 5: Overall what are your thoughts?
- โThe result of the brain drain is businesses are not able to invest into their own cybersecurity team because the resources are simply not available, excluding the cost to find new candidates which is astronomical. You see more businesses coming to Nclose to solve the brain drain problem by outsourcing cybersecurity to a partner like us because the cost variable is far more efficient than investing in their own team, and this is likely to continue like this moving forward.โ
Paul Grapendaal, Ncloseโs Head of Managed Security Services
Question 1: What has changed?
- โThe South African businesses mentality has shifted from if to when they will be compromised and are understanding the consequences of how severe the impact will be, because the monetary resource and/or downtime it will take a business to get back up and running is enormous. More and more businesses are sharing their stories, and many are understanding that itโs only a matter of time until they are a target.โ
Question 2: How have businesses adapted?
- โWith the current global environment, businesses are prepared to invest more into cybersecurity as a business essential and itโs becoming a culture shift in general that this is something more employees are aware of and part of standard company practice.โ
Question 3: Contributing factors?
- โA significant contributor to the shift has been improvements and advancements in the technology to better detect, protect and mitigate clients from threats. Clients are now able to leverage the full value of a partner like us, so that they reap the full benefits of our prevention and detection services.โ
Question 4: Challenges being faced?
- โA big challenge is the global shortage โ not just South Africa – of security skills, and with that security specialists can move around quite freely in the market, so businesses canโt build dependency on specific key individuals which could potentially be risk to the business. However, by partnering with someone like Nclose they get a more consistent delivery of service regardless of if people leave because the service is delivered by a team of people rather than a few individuals.โ
Question 5: Overall what are your thoughts?
- โI think Covid provided a great opportunity for businesses to move forward with adoption of cloud and remote services, but the whole move towards the remote workforce model has made businesses a bit more vulnerable to cyber threats. The world was heading in that direction to begin with, and I think itโs just sort of created the perfect storm, which is why we are seeing those partnerships and investments into cybersecurity. Covid has accelerated the move to cloud and the death of the perimeter mindset.โ