Cloud provider warns up to 90% of organizations at cyber risk

Thousands more interactions and transactions are taking place digitally for companies because of the COVID-19 pandemic, however organizations in The Bahamas and the rest of the region are 80 to 90 percent at risk of information and communication technology (ICT) penetration, revealed a local leader in cloud services.

Scott MacKenzie, chief executive officer of New Providence-based Cloud Carib, said within the Caribbean and Latin America there are very high numbers of systems that are at risk unless they’re being managed by a professional organization.

He said behavioral patterns have lead to most organizations in the region still using outdated ICT practices.

“Our experience with customers when we onboard new clients, I would say 80 to 90 percent of them are at severe risk when we onboard them because they are practicing ICT from an outdated methodology. They’re not patching their stuff every month, they’re not maintaining their applications to the latest versions. They’re thinking about ICT like it’s a fixed asset like a refrigerator or a stove or any other type of fixed asset. You can’t think of ICT like that,” MacKenzie told Guardian Business.

“ICT is not something that you can just buy nowadays and just sit on your desk and forget about it. It’s something that you have to be very, very proactive in managing and maintaining or you’re deeply at risk. It’s no different than a mobile phone. That’s why companies like Apple and Android encourage users to turn on auto updates on their phones, because the users are naturally less likely to maintain their systems. It’s better for service providers to ensure that things are patched and managed and maintained.”

Last week, Guardian Business reported that The Bahamas dropped five places in the United Nations (UN) Global Cybersecurity Index, which measures a country’s commitment to cybersecurity, ranking 133 out of 193 countries worldwide.

Asked how the country maneuvers out of this position, MacKenzie said it’s up to citizens to demand digitization practices that match international best practices.

“That’s something I know in The Bahamas we need to be much better at, digitizing processes. It should be required if you’re interacting with any government and it’s not just The Bahamas, it’s other countries in the region, if you’re renewing your passport, you should not have to go into a physical building except maybe to give your fingerprint or some verification check,” he said.

“But 99 percent of that should be electronic. It’s the same as any other citizen-to-government process. All of that should be digitized. That’s where I think The Bahamas could be very proud of, seeing the government put in the foundation for all of the change and now we’re starting to see some of these digital processes come out. And I think it’s going to make a massive change in the next couple of years.”

It also takes a significant commitment from the business community, MacKenzie said.

“I think business leadership and board directors have to be very conscious of risk and making sure they’re doing proper governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) associated with the management structures of their companies. Because if they’re approaching GRC strategically and they’re following international standards associated with security that people should be following – such as ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 27002  which are both core in what most organizations lean to in North America – compliance and making those compliance strategies in organizations are critical,” he said.

“So it should start within companies at the highest level, board and senior management, making sure that they enforce those practices and that they’re also doing third party audits. That’s something that happens quite frequently for us. We are a service provider that manages all of this stuff for customers, but we still recommend that our customers do third party audits against their operator once a year.

“Although we do regularly audit ourselves, you should always have a third party auditor to ensure that we’re following best practices and delivering exactly what we said we would deliver. It’s no different than a financial audit for a company… to ensure your books are clean.”

While The Bahamas scored low on its cyber security position, recent data from the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Database 2020 showed that close to 90 percent of the Bahamian population has access to the internet, which is roughly a 50 percent increase compared to a decade ago.

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source https://thenassauguardian.com/cloud-provider-warns-up-to-90-of-organizations-at-cyber-risk/