With the cyber crime threat to businesses growing, addressing cyber security and data protection together is crucial.
This is according to Kate Mollett, regional director for Commvault Africa, who spoke at the Commvault Connections SA event in Johannesburg this week.
She said that companies and governments in Africa are actively trying to increase their cyber resilience. However, it is difficult to be one step ahead of the bad actors as cyber crime syndicates are becoming more sophisticated and have access to tools such as artificial intelligence and encryption.
“Our theory is that data protection and security is a team sport. So these two teams that would typically operate independently have to work together. And we feel that part of our responsibility is to enable the data protection teams to do more with the resources that they have,” added Mollett.
Earlier this year, research by Surfshark placed South Africa as the 5th highest country in the world in terms of cyber crime density, which measures the number of cyber crime victims per 1 million internet users.
Mollett said that most local organisations have cyber security measures in place to protect their customers but often overlook the need to have security for their internal processes and systems.
“What we've seen is that many organisations, while preparing for POPIA, made investments in the customer facing applications but what was overlooked [as the lower priority] was what they were doing with internal data, like HR data.There’s still quite a lot to be done, I think, from a South African perspective, in terms of understanding not only their external data or the data they leverage for their business, but also their internal data.”
She suggested that taking a more proactive approach in data protection and security can help neutralise threats before they can gain a foothold. Using various proactive ways such as early detection, active defence strategy and building cyber resilience local organisations can strengthen themselves against possible cyber attacks.
New layer of security
At the Commvault Connections event, the company unveiled a new layer to its cyber security platform that is meant to provide prevention rather than cure when dealing with security issues.
The new Commvault ecosystem includes security measures such as risk analysis, defensive measures such as threat scan and auto recovery, and finally recovery measures such as fault tolerant object storage protection.
“I think that our most important message right now is around building cyber resiliency into the data protection environment," explained Mollett. "You cannot look at your backup environment as your sort of last line of defence. You want to be able to mitigate any kind of risk. And we really believe that we can assist customers with that, with building resiliency into the environment and being able to ensure that they have an active defence strategy."
Share