Pan-African telecommunications services provider Liquid Intelligent Technologies is planning to expand its Cyber Security Fusion Centre to other parts of Africa, after seeing increased demand for security services in South Africa.
Last July, Liquid C2, the cloud and cyber security unit of Liquid Intelligent Technologies, launched its first African Cyber Security Fusion Centre, in Johannesburg.
David Behr, CEO of Liquid C2, provided an update of the company’s strategy around the centres, at the ITWeb Security Summit 2023, held in Sandton this week.
Since the launch of the Johannesburg-based Cyber Security Fusion Centre, the company has added two more centres, in Kenya (December) and Zambia (March 2023), as it looks to further expand its network across the continent. According to Behr, plans are in place to build security centres in Egypt, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe.
“We’ve been running now in South Africa for about six months or so, and we are very happy to see the increase in our customer base and the number of services we provide."
The local centre encompasses security offerings from Microsoft, ITC Secure and Xcitium (previously Comodo Security Solutions), ensuring customers have support across cyber security, cloud and networks for end-to-end security.
Discussing the pros of outsourcing a security operations centre (SOC) for organisations, Behr noted businesses are continually investing in their digital transformation strategy, but aren’t paying enough attention to their cyber security strategy.
He highlighted the increasing sophistication of cyber crimes, such as phishing, ransomware, denial-of-service attacks, business e-mail compromise and password attacks, enabled by the accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence, cloud, and hybrid working models.
Benefits of leveraging a trusted security partner, according to Behr, are: 24/7 monitoring of company systems; cost efficiency; compliance and regulatory support; a focus on core competencies and having a partner with expertise and experience in cyber-security.
“An outsourced SOC enables global and national threats and vulnerabilities to be escalated to management, to allow for prioritisation of defences. Cost to implement and run a SOC for 24/7 monitoring is dramatically reduced by using a shared resource model and the burden of acquiring and retaining cyber resources is transferred to the service provider. Furthermore actionable intelligence is provided through customised reporting from skilled analysts,” he concluded.
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