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Security vital to digital transformation success

Regina Pazvakavambwa
By Regina Pazvakavambwa, ITWeb portals journalist.
Dubai, 29 Sept 2016
It's critical that businesses embed security across their entire network, applications and access points, says Microsoft's Hesham Saad.
It's critical that businesses embed security across their entire network, applications and access points, says Microsoft's Hesham Saad.

With headline-grabbing cyber attacks on the rise, security concerns are preventing companies in the Middle East and Africa from fully realising digital transformation because of a lack of a robust and agile IT security policy.

This is according to Hesham Saad, product marketing manager at Microsoft Gulf, speaking at the Digital Transformation for the Modern Enterprise Media Event in Dubai yesterday.

He noted security is a vital component of digital transformation success.

With organisations facing new threats that cannot be detected by traditional methods like anti-virus, business leaders need to start thinking differently about network security, he added.

Because organisations have either been breached or will be breached, they need to look into how to protect their network pre-breach and also post-breach, said Saad.

Denis Klimashev, Windows and devices business group director for Middle East and Africa at Microsoft, noted that as more and more companies become digital, security threats are becoming one of their key concerns.

Saad said digital transformation touches everything, especially with industries realising the advantages of the Internet of things (IOT) to beat competition.

He pointed out that digital technologies like IOT will add $14 trillion to the world's 20 largest economies by 2030. That is one-fifth of the current world GDP.

"The Internet of things means software sensors are connected to 'things', including machines, buildings and tools, and are enabling these things to learn and adapt with human-like intelligence."

But IOT also means infinitely more data being stored, and more employees with access to sensitive information, said Saad.

A solid IT infrastructure will determine the capacity to ensure that all this data and these 'things' can be controlled and managed centrally, he added.

Organisations may think that strong security measures through processes and systems mean they have to forfeit agility but this is not true.

"With an intelligent cloud server, you can be both agile and secure. The intelligent cloud is able to follow automated rules that reflect a company's security policies. Setting regular storage updates and automatic security updates means there is less pressure on human capacity."

Saad pointed out security should no longer operate as a siloed IT function, but as a fundamental business process that is aligned to business objectives.

It's critical that businesses embed security across their entire network, applications and access points to detect, analyse and block suspicious behaviour, he commented.

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