FEATURE : SOC in many countries of sub-Saharan Africa , SOCs are still a privilege of government agencies and large corporations . And even these organisations sometimes report the lack of a mature cybersecurity strategy that covers all aspects of advanced threat defence .
IBM ’ s Hand added : “ We ’ re seeing organisations across all major industries adopting SOCs . The energy , manufacturing and healthcare industries – highly regulated industries which experienced the highest number of cyberattacks as well as increases in the average total cost of a data breach are driving adoption across the continent . Not far behind in adoption are the financial , retail , industrial , services and transportation industries which continue to face high attack volumes .”
Ian Jansen van Rensburg , Lead Technologist , VMware , said current approaches to cybersecurity make it impossibly complex to implement comprehensive best practices across an enterprise IT environment .
Van Rensburg said there is a huge assortment of security tools to manage : firewalls , anti-virus , intrusion prevention systems and threat detection systems , to name a few . “ Each tool has an enormous number of rules to manage . In turn , each of these must be set up to enforce access control and information protection policies at enterprise scale for all users and systems across the business . In some cases , this could literally mean millions of rules . Simply put , this makes for a configuration nightmare ,” he said .
SOC challenges
As CIOs and CISOs on the continent increasingly adopt SOCs , industry experts warn that they need to be extra careful when developing their own SOC or when outsourcing services from a SOC .
According to Hand , CIOs and CISOs must first understand that there is a high cost to a security failure . According to our 2020 Cost of Data Breach study , there was an increase in companies that experienced
Sheldon Hand , Data and AI , Automation and Security Business Unit Leader , IBM Southern Africa
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