THE COVID-19 pandemic has caused businesses across the globe to transition to a remote work environment almost overnight at unprecedented scale and speed.
The need for a sudden transition to working remotely, what are the challenges faced by organisations in Malaysia? One that is worth to highlight is cyber threats.
According to a study commissioned by Cisco and conducted by YouGov titled the Future of Secure Remote Work, organisations in Malaysia are seeing an increase in cybersecurity challenges with malicious actors trying to take advantage of potential security gaps as people work from home, accessing corporate networks and cloud applications remotely.
Based on the study, 62% of the respondents experienced (a 25% or more jump) in either cyber threats or alerts since the start of COVID-19. Meanwhile, top cybersecurity challenges faced by most organizations is secure access (74%). Other concerns raised by organisations in Malaysia include data privacy (65%), which has implications for the overall security posture, and maintaining control and enforcing policies (60%).
Besides that, endpoint protection is the main challenge for organizations to protect with two in three respondents stating that office laptops/desktops (58%) and personal devices (62%) are a challenge to protect in a remote environment. This is followed by customer information (56%) and cloud applications (55%).
In fact, cyber threats faced by organisations has been a long-standing issue. A survey conducted by property and casualty insurance company Chubb in 2019 found that 84% of its respondents which are Malaysia SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) were affected by cyber incidents.
Furthermore, a study by MICROSOFT in collaboration with Frost & Sullivan in 2018 titled “Understanding the Cybersecurity Threat Landscape in Asia Pacific: Securing the Modern Enterprise in a Digital World” revealed that the potential economic loss in Malaysia due to cyber-security incidents can hit a staggering US$12.2 bil (RM50.08 bil). This translates to more than 4% of Malaysia’s total gross development product (GDP) of US$296 bil (RM1.22 tril).
With the acceleration of digital transformation thanks to the pandemic, cyber security is now and should be a major concern.
“Businesses and other stakeholders need to make cybersecurity the foundation of their IT investment strategy immediately,” Cisco Malaysia’s managing director Albert Chai said.
He added that this is because while prolonged and productive remote working has proven to be possible, keeping businesses running in this new and extremely different environment will require securing access at a greater scale than ever before.
“There is also a unique opportunity to transform the way we approach security as an industry to better meet the needs of our customers and end-users.” – March 21, 2021
