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Symantec Channel Manager, Nigeria & Ghana, Adeyemi Adeleke;
Finance Director, JSP Communications Consultancy, Joseph Adeboyejo and Symantec
Territory Manager, IWECA (Indian Islands, West, East and Central Africa),
Sheldon Hand during the Company's Media Roundtable at Sheraton Hotel and
Towers, Ikeja, Lagos recently
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By Prince Osuagwu
You cant fault World renowned cyber Security company, Symantec, when it makes pronouncements. This is so because its projections and forecasts in world internet security environment has always stand the test of time.
Moreover, its popular global internet security report has been extremely reliable, providing industry practitioners with the opportunity of knowing what next attack looks like and what to do to stay afloat.
Ofcourse, for a company which investment in R&D alone is far bigger than the revenue of its closest competitor, you stand no chance to argue its authority in this business.
Last week,Symantec gathered the top ICT reporters in Nigeria at a roundtable discussion. The alarming outcome of that encounter is the pronouncement that Nigeria now occupies the 59th position among countries of the world with alarming internet security risks. to be in that position, we moved six steps upward - a forward movement that only tells how closer we are to losing major businesses due to internet attack. The unfortunate thing is that this is when Nigeria is gearing towards joining other developed countries of the world to entrench the cashless way of transaction in the country. Symantec, through its Territory Manager, Indian Ocean Islands , West,
East and Central Africa , Mr Sheldon Hand, fingered Nigeria’s
explosive ICT growth as one of the reasons the country keeps soaring in cyber
threats. He however noted that the price the country would have to pay in the
kind of growth experienced in ICT in the last decade would also be a
commensurate threat growth.
He said that the worst hit would be the small and medium businesses which,
up to 50 percent worldwide, do not have recovery plans. This is even when
reports have shown that 71 per cent of SMBs that suffered a cyber attack never
recovered.
Hand however, said that enterprises and consumers needed to be wary about
four key trends in the security landscape which it discovered in its Global Internet
security threat reports volume 17.
The report released recently identified four key trends in cyber threat,
including malware atta
cks, targeted attacks, mobile threats and data breaches.
It could be recalled that the same report indicated that Nigeria stepped up six
positions to rank 59
th in global internet threat, a case Hand said
was partly due to major developments in the ICT landscape including growth in
internet subscription and penetration, adoption and use of modern gadgets and
applications like smart phones, PCs and tablets as well as Nigeria’s in roads
in submarine broadband cables.
Hand even predicted that the threats targeted at mobile devices would be on
the increase in 2012, particularly as the sale of smartphones and mobile money
transfers continued to gain ground. Meanwhile, in the same way was mobile
malware said to be poised for tangible threat to enterprises and consumers if they
failed to take measures at safeguarding their systems and devices.
Now, look at how Hand summed it all up: “While profits remain lucrative in
the Personal Computer space, mobile offers new opportunities to cybercriminals
that potentially are more profitable. Mobile growth also creates an urgent
concern to organisations around the possibility of breaches. Given the
intertwining of work and personal information on mobile devices the loss of
confidential information presents a real risk to businesses. Unlike a desktop
computer, or even a laptop, mobile devices are easily lost.”
He advocated best practice guidelines, including developing and enforcing IT
policies, protection of information, authentication of identities, efficient
management of systems and adequate protection of key infrastructures.
But Hand was also on hand to unveil some of Symantec’s products meant to
help businesses out of the cyber threat quagmire. They include the Backup Exec
2012, which is a cloud-based disaster recovery solution with simplified user
interface and NetBackup 7.5 that simplifies management and recovery of storage
level snapshot from a single console.
Besides, Hand said that his company not only protects
systems but also protect peoples and their businesses as they use technology. “We
are not just a technology company but also provide synergy to a whole lot of
information out there for people to manage their lives and businesses. We take
care of security risks and threats arising from cyber breaches, consumerization
of IT due to different surge of IT tools, devices and gadgets and management of
information explosion due to data growth”.
Symantec, according to Hand, backs up 50 percent of
the world businesses even as it prides itself as having investment in R&D that
is bigger than the revenue of its closest competitor
.An honest evaluation of what Hand wanted everybody to know at that meeting that security is an issue that needed to be tackled before an attempt to ;aunch cashless policy full scale in Nigeria. I actually seem to agree with that!
