The Africa Cloud and Security Summit Couldn’t Have Come at a Better Time

The first edition of the Africa Cloud and Security Summit since the rebrand from CIO East Africa to CIO Africa has happened. The event was held on the 17^th and 18^th March 2021 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Nairobi with a significant number of delegates following the proceedings online.

Today, a lot of organisations are focusing on recovery from the two years that the pandemic has ravaged the global economy. During those two years of the pandemic, the globe was almost forced to fast track Digital Transformation. It was during the pandemic that a lot of people began speaking about digital transformation.

As most companies had their employees working from home; attending meetings and communicating with your colleagues online without necessarily being physically close. With this digital transformation came the issue of security. Companies began asking if their data is secure online with employees working from different areas.

Now that we are almost/ already into the post pandemic phase and the talk around the tech world is migration to the cloud. Even as we are moving to the cloud, cyber security is a conversation that the world is not done with yet.

“We designed the agenda to provide a good mix of cloud technology trends and the security imperatives to operate in a secure cloud environment. Most of the discussions we had on Day one focuses on cloud computing and its flavours including strategies, planning and deployment,” the Chairman and Publisher, Harry Hare, commented about the event.

“On day two our focus changed to security and all aspects of vulnerability management and best practices for reducing risk which is all about collaborating for the collective defense with a focus on how we are all interconnected, interdependent, and therefore share responsibility for a collective defense,” he added.

In the current world, incidents like solar winds, colonial pipeline and a barrage of ransomware attacks against our schools, hospitals, and SMEs have shown us that indeed cyber security impacts our every day lives.

These incidents also show us the need to address shared cybersecurity risk and the attendance at of the Africa Cloud and Security Summit proved that truly it is a shared risk.

“With most of our workload now in the cloud, we have to focus on strengthening our cyber defenses and investing in new capabilities and fundamentally reimagining how we think about the cloud and cybersecurity,” Harry Hare further says.

CIO Africa still has a lot planned out for the African tech community as it drives digital transformation and migration to the cloud.

CIO 100 nominations are beginning in April, just before CIO Africa hosts the Africa SaccoTech Forum. The month after that, we hold the Africa Fintech Summit and we encourage you to register and attend the events.