Nigeria's explosive ICT market comes with cyber threat price, says Symantec

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

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!