By Prince Osuagwu

AS a growing and vibrant economy, Nigeria is on the spotlight in the world market. This also makes businesses from the country primary targets for both supports and collaborations.

However, these do not come without a price, as Symantec’s regional director for Africa, Mr Gordon Love, at the weekend warned Nigeria businesses to adopt strict security measures and best practices or face the consequences of vulnerability to cyber attacks.

Love who visited the country weekend and interacted with major Nigerian ICT media professionals said that Nigerian businesses are on the radar of cyber criminals due to the fast pace the Nigerian economy is growing.

He warned that the alarming rate with which malicious cyber attacks are increasing and the sophistication the attackers are giving to their trade, any company that compromises on security will face dare consequences.

According to him, “between 2010 and 2011, the number of malicious attacks increased with about 81 percent and alarmingly, it is becoming very advanced in style. In the last twelve months, over 20 million threats were released and the more these are released, the more vulnerable, systems become worldwide.

“Credit card information in most developed economies are sold cheaper than a bottle of soft drink, meaning that attack on personal information is becoming as easy as anything. But the real danger, however, is that cyber attack is fast approaching the espionage era. Attackers are devising means of getting information and escaping without anybody noticing their actions. So for growing economies like Nigeria, security should be a priority” he added.

Best practice

However, Love pointed the way out for any serious business. He advised that businesses must always strive to create an Internal Corporate Security Task Team to work with a trusted security vendor to mobilize a team of security specialists and perform a detailed analysis of the current risk.

*Review security operations process and infrastructure, and design and implement an industry compliant Security Operation Center.

*Integrate a breach prevention and response plan into the day-to-day operations of the security team. Run Vulnerability and Malicious Activity Assessments in addition to penetration tests to determine current weakness for external and internal exposure.

*Procure products and services for all required software and infrastructure to implement critical recommendations and deploy optimized protection to secure all business environments.

*Implement a Managed Security Service (MSS), supplemented by senior resident resources. Part of the MSS will be the implementation of a 24/7 global intelligence monitoring service.

*Ensure infrastructure security across all endpoints including mobile devices, ensure security products are up to date and avoid pirated software.

*Have a disaster recovery plan in place; it is important to have data backed up, encrypted and secure.

*Protect and educate users with identity and access control, two-factor authentication and conduct security awareness training.

Backup appliances for Nigeria

Love also announced that his company has decided to release its new backup appliances – NetBackup 5220 and Backup Exec 3600 to Nigeria to help businesses stay afloat and healthy.

These backup appliances will help mid-sized and large enterprise organizations, remote offices and data centers to modernise their backup infrastructures and accelerate new initiatives around virtualisation with greater ease and reliability. Touted with easy deployment of just about few minutes, Symantec appliances enables organisations to protect information, in physical or virtual environments, and to de-duplicate data across the board to improve efficiency while reducing costs.

According to Love, “for the first time in Nigeria, Symantec will be offering an all-in-one, scalable backup appliance for midsized to enterprise organizations. These innovative solutions include Symantec’s content-aware deduplication, which can decrease backup storage up to 50 times and bandwidth consumption up to 99 percent, eliminating backup window problems and enabling cost-effective replication of data to other sites for business continuity.”

For many customers, the challenges with protecting virtual and physical servers have been heightened by the proliferation of different backup solutions in a single environment and the integration problems between the hardware and software. Symantec’s backup appliances deliver an end-to-end integrated backup device for servers, storage, and software.

“While many solutions require the IT team to integrate multiple solutions for tape, disk, dedupe, physical, virtual snapshots and backup, Symantec appliances are typically installed in less than 30 minutes and deliver integrated hardware, software and dedupe storage, providing customers with simplicity and performance from one vendor. Appliances offer a modern approach to backup,” continued Love.