Creating holistic system to help firms better weather storms that lie ahead

The cybersecurity landscape has become complex, dynamically evolving, and filled with disruption and threats. FILE PHOTO | SHUTTERSTOCK

Kenya’s security architecture has to evolve to become more resilient and dynamic to keep up with an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape.

The cybersecurity landscape has become complex, dynamically evolving, and filled with disruption and threats.

Malicious cyber actors are more determined, attack vectors more sophisticated, and changing models of work are opening up new avenues of vulnerability and risk.

Organisations are looking for stability, certainty and refined tools and techniques that will allow them to successfully navigate this landscape.

Organisations need a unified, resilient, and dynamic security architecture that’s capable of addressing the challenges and complexities of traditionally siloed security architecture to ensure their resilience and security within a hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

The 2022 NTT Security Holdings Global Threat Intelligence Report collated global attack data from 1,500 enterprises across more than 800 billion logs processed each month to unpack the landscape, its risks, and some of the key challenges.

It found that there was a 30 percent increase in hostile activity with web applications and application-specific attacks on the rise.

The report also revealed that a new vulnerability was registered every 24 minutes in 2021 with 21,957 vulnerabilities in total – the highest on record.

The problem is that organisations are still sitting within their siloed approach to cybersecurity enforcement which is inadequate in securing against modern-day threat actors.

Many appreciate the gaps (limited visibility, delayed manual detection, and reactive response) that are inherent within their current approach but aren’t sure how to leverage existing security tools to create a unified platform.

They don’t know where to start. It’s an understandable sticking point – they have to find the solutions that work for them in a multitude that all promise the same thing, and then they have to optimise them to deliver the right layers of security within their unique operating environments.

Expertise is one of the biggest hindrances to organisations achieving holistic security.

The other challenge is the underlying structures within the business. Often, different security tools have different custodians within the organisation.

There’s a firewall falling under the infrastructure team, application security falling under the cybersecurity team, and data loss prevention falling under the risk department.

Companies need to harmonise these different stakeholders to ensure that the tools under their custody are integrated and operate as a single platform otherwise there is a risk that they will limit one another and create more complexity than is needed.

Of course, one of the biggest issues that circles around security is cost. One of the biggest misconceptions is that achieving a unified security architecture is expensive.

Mr Lloyd Oandah, is theTechnical Solutions Architect – Dimension Data East Africa.