According to the latest Kaspersky study, 46% of geo-distributed businesses surveyed in South Africa identified a disparity between the levels of cyber protection across all sites: 30% of these companies admitted to this problem but didn't think it was critical and the remaining 16% stated their branches required much more cyber security measures to be implemented. However, Kaspersky’s experts are warning multi-site businesses that such a disparity can endanger the whole organisation.
The Kaspersky report, “Managing geographically distributed businesses: Challenges and solutions”, provides deeper insight into the network and information security challenges faced by geo-distributed companies and highlights solutions organisations employ to overcome these difficulties. It covered network and information security decision makers in 20 countries worldwide.
According to this report, 54% of respondents in South Africa were confident that protection from cyber threats in their head offices was equally effective in their local offices and 46% stated that there was a disparity between these levels of cyber security (30% of them believed that the problem existed but it was not critical and said most local offices were generally well-protected and 16% were not enthusiastic and supposed that only some or a few of the branches were under control).
In addition to budgetary constraints, one of the reasons for such a disparity is lack of trust in local expertise. In 26% of cases in South Africa, head offices assumed responsibility for all cyber security activities in branches, stating that local staff didn't have sufficient knowledge and qualifications. Even in 72% of instances when cyber security tasks were shared equally between head offices and local teams, all the activities were supervised by head office. In 2% of cases, all monitoring is done by local teams.
"Although the most sensitive data may be held centrally, access to the company’s assets is clearly required from several locations and, when they are not as well protected as head office, it creates security risks for the whole organisation. Perhaps there is a misconception that a lower level of protection will suffice for sites that play a secondary role in the company’s structure. However, cyber criminals don’t care which place gets attacked – be it head office or its branches – they can penetrate the company’s infrastructure from any location. Therefore, it’s important to enable protection that is equally effective at all sites," comments Anton Solovey, Senior product manager extended detection and response (XDR) at Kaspersky.
To protect geo-distributed companies from cyber threats, Kaspersky experts recommend employing centralised and automated solutions to ensure comprehensive cyber protection of all company assets and processes at head offices and local offices. By aggregating and correlating data from multiple sources in one place and leveraging machine learning technologies, this solution provides effective threat detection and rapid automated response.
The full report with more findings on the challenges facing geo-distributed companies is available via this link.
