The Importance Of Companies Understanding Cybersecurity Before Digital Transformation

Illustration/Photo: Antara

JAKARTA - IBM Indonesia President Director and Technology Leader Cin Cin Go said companies need to understand cybersecurity issues as the most basic thing before deciding to carry out digital transformation.

"Everyone wants digital transformation, but the most basic thing before an organization decides to enter the world of digital transformation, security is a big enough obstacle, users and organizations, both from the IT side and from security officers in an organization, they must understand first," said Cin Cin Go in a virtual media briefing, Wednesday, March 9.

There are at least three important points that he underlined for companies to ensure the state of their digital infrastructure.

First, companies need to realize that digital transformation allows users to access the platform from anywhere through more than one device. This situation allows for a significant increase in traffic that can pose a cybersecurity risk.

"Moreover, with the pandemic, we are more comfortable doing transactions from home, working from home, accessing applications from home comfortably and that causes quite high traffic," said Cin Cin.

Second, companies need to ensure and monitor security layers by layer before employees access databases that contain vulnerable information such as financial data. This, continued Cin Cin, as an effort to prevent cyber attacks when traffic enters.

"Security officers must be able to define whether the employee's device is safe, whether it has been verified by IT, those are things that need to be considered before entering the digital transformation agenda," he said.

Third, related to infrastructure. Cin Cin said that IBM always emphasizes to clients that a zero-trust strategy is very important in carrying out an infrastructure design, starting from servers, networks, to storage.

"These three things become the most basic points when a client decides to enter digital transformation," he said.

On the same occasion, Cin Cin mentioned the latest IBM Security X-Force Threat Intelligence Index report which found that Asia was the region that experienced the most cyber attacks than any other region in the past year. In Asia, financial services and manufacturing experienced nearly 60 percent of cyberattacks.