Though the South African IT security landscape is more advanced than the rest of Africa's, Check Point Software Technologies sees huge opportunities in the market and intends to channel more investment into it.
This was the word from Amnon Bar-Lev, president of Check Point, in an exclusive interview with ITWeb on the sidelines of the Check Point Security Tour SA, in Johannesburg, yesterday.
He revealed that Check Point has witnessed an increase in business on the local front over the past couple of years.
"We intend to continue growing our presence in the South African market. In SA, and Africa as a whole, we also intend to open more offices and continue to invest as well," said Bar-Lev.
SA, just like any other country, is at the mercy of the changing threat landscape and should therefore have solutions to mitigate these threats, he said.
Quoting the company's 2013 Security Report, based on research of nearly 900 companies, Bar-Lev said botnets and data loss were the biggest security threats facing organisations globally.
"Many organisations (63%) suffer from botnets. A lot of organisations are using malicious applications; going to the wrong Web sites. So, clearly, we see a lot of organisations losing data.
"The security industry has become sophisticated and complicated. Smart people are getting smarter and the bag guys now have more resources. It's no longer about individuals, but countries are also now involved. However, we have to keep innovating to stay ahead and I think this is only the beginning of it.
"But the message is: things are happening and organisations need to be proactive; you don't want your organisation to make headlines for the wrong reasons and you don't want to lose your data. What you need to do is build the right architecture for that," Bar-Lev said.
Overall, when analysing the attacks affecting organisations, there is evidence that about 90% of them could have been solved if organisations had put very basic security measures in place, he noted.
"My recommendation to organisations is not to put in place complex security systems. For example, there is no need to have different security solutions from multiple vendors sitting on the same infrastructure to protect against threats. You need something simple and straightforward.
"There is no reason to have five boxes, one after the other. This will mean different policies on things like firewall, IPS, proxy and VPN. This will lead to a complex network of many vendors.
"The problem with this is you will not have a single policy for all these. You will not have a single point of correlation; you will have less visibility - you basically lose control of what you are doing."
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