Digitalisation in West Africa is a perpetual process. Organisations are investing in the infrastructure and platforms that will power business for the next decade, blazing a new trail for themselves and, in the process, modernising legacy systems and applications.
However, each organisation has to confront the potential for a security incident. Case in point, according to Check Point’s African Perspectives on Cyber Security report for 2024, Nigeria faces one of the highest rates of cyberattacks in Africa, with organisations being attacked on average 3,759 times per week.
The country’s finance sector alone faced an average of 4,718 attacks per week thanks to key vulnerabilities such as weak multi-factor authentication and outdated systems.
When modernising infrastructure and applications, organisations cannot consider security after the fact. IT security is ideally ‘baked’ into any platform or application they utilise, thus reinforcing themselves with an adequate level of resilience against incidents and threat actors.
Security starts from the ground up, and with the help of the right platforms and their features, organisations can make it a cornerstone of their modernisation efforts.
What it means to ‘modernise’
Today, any modernisation plan related to enterprise software and systems is an exercise in optimisation or opening the door to integrating new technologies. Done correctly, the benefits are numerous.
Organisations enjoy improved performance and scalability, increased resource efficiency, and reduced costs.
On the flip side, modernising systems sets the stage for artificial intelligence (AI) and enabled applications, increased use of data analytics, migration to cloud environments, and other technological trends that influence present-day business.
Application modernisation is of particular importance to the modern enterprise. According to the Red Hat State of Modernisation report, 95% of survey respondents believe that modernising their applications is essential for their organisation’s success, a process that encompasses many different initiatives such as improving continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines and data modernisation.
At the same time, security is one of the most cited reasons for modernisation. Indeed, modernised applications benefit from improved security features, making them less vulnerable to threats and contributing to the overall resilience of the organisation and its systems.
In doing so, organisations rethink their security practices and align them with the new operating reality.
Layering security
As more and more businesses in West Africa migrate to cloud environments and IT infrastructure becomes increasingly complex, they need to shift their security approaches.
Because they no longer have a defined security perimeter, traditional measures won’t be sufficient. For example, the first step organisations can take is to centralise their identity management and access controls, assigning employees and users only the minimum access required to do their jobs.
From there, organisations should execute a layered, in-depth security strategy and prioritise vendor platforms that cater to it.
Operating systems, which let organisations prioritise a security-focused foundation for applications and processes, should have built-in tools that help organisations meet security compliance requirements, including implementing and improving physical and network security.
Container platforms should offer network controls, integrated certificate management, and network micro-segmentation for increased container security.
Finally, organisations should select an automation language and platform that everyone across the organisation can learn and use.
In doing so, organisations can easily leverage access control, logging, and auditing capabilities across all (modern) IT functions and teams.
With so much on the line and the threat landscape constantly growing, this is how businesses in West Africa can take a holistic approach to IT security as they continue to digitally transform.
From the applications themselves to the platforms used by development and operations teams, security becomes a tentpole as innovations take enterprise IT to a whole new level.
