We are back. This time we are talking about security, cybersecurity, that is. Our recent series of articles, titled ‘A Roadmap to Digital Transformation’, guided local businesses on leveraging digital technologies to enhance and improve the customer’s journey, employee’s engagement, increased operational efficiencies, as well as product and service delivery. We also made it quite clear that digital transformation (DT) in any organisation is, surprisingly to many, less about technology and a lot more about the people and their mindset. Still, the security associated with the implementation and ongoing use of the requisite technology is critical.

A cyber pandemic is brewing

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report for 2021 placed cybersecurity failure among the most significant threats facing humanity within the next 10 years. Let that sink it. Are you prepared? In the last six months, two major cybersecurity incidents, the Solarwinds attack and the Colonial Pipeline Cyber attack, affected thousands of people in very different ways. Both are huge deals, we will explain in upcoming articles.

Curse of knowledge

Sadly, too many in the IT security industry suffer from the “curse of knowledge”, generally defined as “a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand.” IT & cybersecurity professionals have a deep understanding of their areas of expertise but find it challenging to communicate in simple terms to non-techie folks, leaving many outside the tech industry not trusting the information provided. Luckily, the IT industry has developed frameworks to make this complex topic easier to understand.

IT security may be complex, but over the next few weeks we would like to take some of the complexity out of the topic, explain why it is necessary, explain these cybersecurity frameworks, and share some best practices on creating your road map for a secure environment.

Trevor Forrest is the founder and CEO of 876 Technology Solutions. Christopher Reckord is CEO of managed IT services provider tTech Limited. Collectively, they have approximately 80 years of experience helping organisations of varying sizes procure and implement information technology solutions and transform digitally.