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Helping South African business tackle cyber threats

With a growing number of South African organisations being targeted by global cyber-attackers, integrated ICT and infrastructure company, Vox, has announced the launch of a new subsidiary, Armata Cyber Intelligence, to provide the technology solutions and niche expertise needed to help local businesses better protect themselves against cyber threats.

Richard Frost.

“South Africa is now the third most targeted country in the world when it comes to cyber-attacks, with the average cost of an attack increasing from R3 million in 2020 to R4 million in 2021. Armata aims to deliver cost-effective intelligent cybersecurity solutions that help achieve zero interruption to our client's business systems while maintaining the highest level of protection for their data, thereby gaining complete confidence in our offerings,” says Richard Frost, product head: Network and Endpoint Security.

The company follows the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, which provides best practice guidelines around how internal and external stakeholders at organisations can better manage and reduce the risk of cyber-attacks. The framework is built around five main functions: identify, protect, detect, respond and recover.

“Cybersecurity is made up of products, people and processes. Many organisations, especially SMBs, lack the funds to support all three in-house. Vox' solution to this is to offer the product and services on a month-to-month basis to provide clients with a more affordable price. This allows clients to scale the solution to their budget and contain their costs in a predictable and controllable manner,” says Frost.

At launch, Armata’s offerings will include cybersecurity solutions, security services, managed security services, consulting services and audits and assessments. This will help organisations comprehensively deal with endpoint security, email security, network security, cloud security, application security, digital security (on mobile and Internet of things devices), web services security and network access control.

It further helps organisations in the areas of identity and access management, backup, data discovery, data loss prevention, information rights management, vulnerability scanning, application code review and threat feeds, whereby customers have access to security intelligence collected from a variety of sources that can be used to proactively mitigate against cyber threats.

“In addition, Armata will offer customers user awareness testing programmes in order to ensure that employees are aware of the security risks. The need for both corporate and personal security education has always been critical, but it has now been brought to the fore with more people working from home, which leaves corporate networks and data more susceptible to attacks through an employee's home network or other unprotected public networks, says Frost.

“By being cyber smart, we can effectively prevent 80% of attacks simply by knowing what to do. The rest of the attacks will be handled by your security solutions.”

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