15 Apr Pandemic pushes IT teams toward cybersecurity as a service

Growing adoption of work from home and a lack of IT skills are set to motivate more South African companies to consider cybersecurity as a service.

South Africa’s lockdown over the last year has accelerated many trends, from e-learning and e-commerce, through to video conferencing and more.

Amid this backdrop, IT security departments are also having to rethink how they do their jobs. For one, these departments have to deal with greater complexity as work-from-home staff present new challenges in terms of securing business networks.

With guards down at home, this has created major headaches for the industry. Cyber criminals have sniffed the opportunity, and in the last year there’s been an exponential rise in cybersecurity attacks across the globe, according to the likes of the South African Journal for Information Science.

For example, a PriceWaterHouseCoopers (PwC) study highlighted how at one point in 2020, cyberattacks and threats on financial institutions alone increased by more than 238%. PwC further highlighted how ransomware attacks grew ninefold in the period, with phishing emails as the primary source.

Magix pioneers cybersecurity first
In the South African context, there’s additional complexity around the country’s severe IT skills shortage, and limited resources — putting companies at a higher risk for fileless attacks and ransomware.

This is why cybersecurity as a service is set to become a growing trend in the SA market as it brings sufficient IT security coverage and depth, as well as scale to many businesses.

In this vein, Magix – one of South Africa’s most established IT security firms – has now launched a first-of-its-kind monthly pay-as-you-go model in the market that seeks to solve this problem head-on and tackle all the security vectors on an ongoing basis.

Called Pretect, this solution aims to prevent and detect IT security risks by providing your organisation with continuous protection and up-to-date awareness of vulnerabilities, both internal and external.

All of this is done via an online cybersecurity portal and this service monitors threats associated with, for instance, connected devices (even if your staff work from home) and social engineering risks. Our team can also carry out traditional PEN testing, putting your team and network through their paces.

Pretect further uses artificial intelligence to detect any strange or anomalous behaviour, and the service can go as far as deactivating any devices.

Results of assessments are available securely online, 24/7, with useful charts and graphs to gain instant feedback on the organisation’s cybersecurity standpoint.

Each month, a security expert also reviews the results and compiles a personalised report. This report indicates progress regarding the trend of vulnerabilities detected, and recommendations for remedial action.

All of this is done at a fixed, affordable rate.

And as the IT security landscape continues to change on a daily basis, there’s no doubt that this model of cyber security as a service will become more important in our fight against criminals.