CIO Year Ahead: Major Industry shifts are changing the IT Security Landscape

As businesses and CIOs embrace new technologies, they are faced with security challenges. The new technologies especially BYOD are the newest headache for most CIOs in any organisations, since BYOD poses the risk of loopholes that cause data leakages making it easy for any hackers to easily access organisations’ sensitive data and as much as any CIOs try to fix the loopholes, the hackers also get smarter in their ways posing even more threats to CIOs to convince the adoption of this new technologies.

This was said during the CIO Year Ahead event held at the Norfolk hotel. The event seeks to bring together analysts, vendors, business and professional associations among other stakeholders in the ICT sector where they meet to learn and explore the latest IT trends and technologies that will benefit their business and help them drive their initiatives in the right direction all year long.

“The underlaying dynamic of the online world has always been that it is easier to attack than defend. Cloud computing, IoT, Mobility, explosion of APIs, growth of connected devices are new major industry shifts that are changing the IT security Landscape. Today everyone is sending their data to the cloud, every organisation is as well embracing Mobility and BYOD, which challenges traditional security and mobile-device management practices. The new technologies have brought in IT Security challenges. This saw in 2012 the World Economic Forum and its community of public and private sector organizations launch a multistakeholder project to address systemic global risks arising from the increasing connectivity of people, processes and objects. Since then, cybersecurity has been an integral part of the Forum’s agenda,” said Rajeev Kumar VP Partner Business, Market Development at TATA Communications.

A country like Kenya losses up to Kshs. 2 billion annually to cyberattacks. Cyber Crime was a world issue that affects everyone in one way or another and therefore private sectors and individuals should explore ways in which they protect their data.He also added that in partnership with other sectors they were out to target the whole Cyber spectrum.

With an internet penetration of approximately 16 million, ICT applications such as e government services have become enablers for the country’s development. Unfortunately, the same gains are under threat from cyber criminals, whose objective is to illegally compromise online systems.It’s important that countries stay one step ahead of cyber criminals.

Cyber Crimes are currently rated as the most committed crimes worldwide even as the world grows through embracing technology and innovation. Most cybercrimes carried out include, fraud, account hacking, dissemination of offensive materials, identity theft among others.

However, It will be increasingly hard to just say ‘no’ to the growing “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) crowd, especially with the arrival of new tools like those rolled out by companies like Apple, Huawei, Samsung, Lenovo you name them. Therefore Dan Brown, CEO Cognesc advised organisations to come up with new policies within to regulate employees on how they use their own devices to execute their office work. “Some organizations these days believe that BYOD is a way the corporation can save money by not buying corporate-issued mobile smartphones or tablets at all for employees, with this in mind there is need to have the right policies for your employees on how they use their own devices at work.”

Speaking at the event on Cyber Security in 2016 and Beyond, Software Engineer Reactor Core, stated that it is quite important for any organisation to share information on attacks.“The reason why it is quite hard for us to address some issues surrounding Cyber Crimes, is the fact that most organisations do not share information in case of an attack as well as the fact that most organisations still focus on growth and forget security. With every attack attackers learn and grow stronger, exchanging information weakens attackers since there are notable trends on the attacks.”

Also highlighted in the event were some notable Cyber crime in the past year which included:Ashley Madison, American Airlines Group, Trump hotel Collection, WhatsApp, Pestate Hub, Git Hub as well as FBI amd Department of Homeland Security, this has seen the US Goverment increase its 2017 budget by 35% to reach USD 19 billion with an allocation to Cyber Defense.

The event also looked at exploring and finding opportunities in Cloud Computing, and Internet of Things going forward.