Demand for cybersecurity solutions anticipated to rise

Cisco South-East Asia’s small business, commercial and distribution’s sales director Raz Mohamad said the threat from cybercrime is real and should be taken seriously by people especially businesses.

PETALING JAYA: Demand for cybersecurity solutions is anticipated to continue to rise even more so during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Cisco South-East Asia’s small business, commercial and distribution’s sales director Raz Mohamad said the threat from cybercrime is real and should be taken seriously by people especially businesses.

“The past year has been a very turbulent time for everyone from across the globe as cybercrime attacks are coming in from all over the world. And it has been affecting a lot of companies especially small and medium enterprises, ” Raz said at a webinar earlier last week.

He said with the pandemic still reigning, a lot has changed in the past one year as working from home has become the new norm.

“It has changed how we work and live. There is now a greater need for collaborative technology as our need to work together and communicate has never been greater because of the lockdowns, ” he said.

“It has however created a lot of exposure with the number of devices online. There is a need for businesses to quickly digitalise. What is usually done between one to three years has to be quickly done within six months, ” Raz added.

He said Cisco’s strategy is to help its customers connect, secure and automate their digital ability in a cloud-first world.

Its solutions allow for companies to secure, any user on any device and on any application anywhere, he noted.

“We want it to be consistent, to ensure it is across all devices and protecting data at the same time, ” Raz said.

Meanwhile, Ken Ang, Cisco’s security business development manager, emphasised the importance for small businesses to at least have its DNS-layer security up as an initial step for setting up security measures.

“With Cisco’s Umbrella, it would actively block users from accessing malicious websites, minimise the risk of users being exposed, ” he said.He explained how crucial simplicity is nowadays in businesses when setting up security measures, and how Cisco’s Duo Multifactor Authenticator is able to provide that in an era where passwords are no longer sufficient.

“Now, you have a second factor to prove that the person accessing your assets is who they say they are. That is very key, especially in businesses where simplicity and ease of use are critical to adoption and protection, ” he said.

Besides that, Ang mentioned how essential visibility is in business growth as it allows them to identify and remove any threats early without needing to invest in or worry about operational costs or time wasted, which is what Cisco Advance Malware Protection (AMP) is for.

It detects and blocks malware and viruses across employee devices, which can be a lot as there are at least 30 billion devices (including IoT devices) connected in the world today.

With Office 365 being the most popular hosted email solution, he explained the potential risks users and businesses may face with countless malicious emails being sent daily and how important it is to have something like Cisco Cloud Mailbox Defence in place despite Office’s existing security measures.

“It is important to add a layer in the event that something falls through what is natively in Office 365. You want a solution like Cisco Cloud Mailbox Defence to be there to catch it and move it to junk or delete it before the user has a chance to click on it, ” he said.

Ang also took some questions from the webinar participants.

One participant asked if Cisco’s cybersecurity solutions could work with their current environment, or if they needed to change everything.

“One of the best things about Duo is that if you go to our website, we have hundreds of applications that can be integrated out of the box with existing infrastructure, ” Ang said.

Another participant asked if they can enable pin codes in Duo if they wanted to as users might accidentally tap approve without checking the details.

“In that aspect, the push notification is a much more frictionless approach. We do provide multiple modes of authentication, whether it’s a one-time password, which is a pin code kind of access, ” replied Ang.

Raz and Ang spoke at the Cybercrime Protection: Why Now More Than Ever webinar on April 27, organised by Star Media Group in partnership with Cisco.

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Watch the webinar replay at bit.ly/starciscofb1