Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 07 | Page 18

TRENDING havoc. The warning is out that more attacks, possibly with greater severity, are in the digital pipeline.” Jacobsz says being aware of your own risks and being alert of any probable threats ‘out there’ is critical to any strategy that is forged with the purpose of adequately protecting yourself. “Each and every computer has the strength to damage reputation and cause revenue loss. It also has the ability to morph into a bot, strengthening the cyberattack and helping in the effort to destruct. The severity of any potential cyberthreat cannot be ignored,” he warns. n Anton Jacobsz, Managing Director at Networks Unlimited applications becomes more critical to the success of the business,” highlights the report. “Attacks continue to grow in sophistication and size, but organisations are also evolving their strategies to address the security of their applications. With security budgets rising in the wake of public attacks, DDoS mitigation solutions, WAFs and anti-fraud protection are among the top app services that organisations plan to deploy over the next 12 months. Respondents who have a WAF and DDoS protection solutions currently deployed, as well as those identifying themselves as representing cloud- first organisations, tend to feel more confident in their ability to withstand application-layer attacks.” According to the research, the complex set of challenges faced by companies at present encompass: • The inability to scale infrastructure and resources to protect against high volume attacks without service interruption; • Compliance with customer expectations and maintaining industry/regulatory standards; • Knowledge and visibility, that is understanding of attacks faced and how to respond to incidents; • The complexity of management explosion of applications, and needing to stop attacks at various stages of exploit; • The migration to cloud services 18 INTELLIGENTCIO leading to an increased need for protection that supports hybrid environments; and • As mentioned, the fact that increased application attacks are getting more sophisticated as attackers seek to penetrate and cripple websites. Simon McCullough, Major Channel Account Manager: sub- Saharan Africa at F5 Networks points out: “Consider some of these stats: 20% of employees would sell their company passwords, and nearly half of those would do so for less than USD1,000! More than 70% of attacks target the user identities and applications, not servers and networks. Yet, 90% of today’s security budgets are still spent on protecting everything but user identities." Anton Jacobsz, Managing Director at Networks Unlimited, value-added distributor of F5 solutions throughout Africa, adds: “As public and private organisations and individuals scramble to protect themselves following the global WannaCry ransomware attack, the cyberattack has highlighted the seriousness of security threats and that they are not singular to only one industry or country but spread a wide range of F5 has put together 10 critical areas of focus that it says will help organisations significantly strengthen their security programme and risk mitigation strategies. www.intelligentcio.com