Learnings from the IDC South Africa CIO Summit 2023 #IDSACIO – Source: securityboulevard.com

My colleagues and our partners attended the annual IDC South Africa CIO Summit 2023 on May 18, 2023 in Johannesburg. We had many great conversations with our partners and their customers, a few key themes emerged this year. 

Enterprises are innovating faster than ever before and the driving thread across all innovation is “digital transformation” – it’s no longer a future initiative or a “big picture strategy” it’s now the norm. Almost every aspect of society is being pushed forward by digitally enabled services such as education healthcare, financial services and the realization that “remote work” is here to stay. 

Corr-Serve is Seceon’s authorized distributor in the Africa IT market. Corr-serve is a South African business dedicated to offering the best cybersecurity, threat management, and application performance management solutions to our partners for their customers.  Mark van Vuuren is the Corr-Serve Product Director.

Theme 1: Attack Surface Expansion and the Need to Modernize  

As the digital footprint expands, so does the attack surface for cyber criminals.  The volume of new workloads and the variety of deployment models they rely on: on-premises, remote offices, remote employees, colocation, hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud, microservices, and the edge (IoT, OT) is making it harder for teams to secure. From observability and monitoring to capturing logs and events across the larger attack surfaces, the rapid attack surface expansion is creating more opportunities for  successful cyber attacks. Enterprises, MSPs, MSSPs are all racing to discover new ways to solve these security challenges. We see and hear the same thing from our partners around the world – the attack surface is so large, that complete defenses are not possible with legacy tools and legacy processes. 

The only way to protect and defend today’s organizations and detect future security breaches and intrusions is with a modernized approach. We believe that requires ingesting as many sources of events and logs from across the larger attack surface and applying AI/ML to analyze in real time for vulnerabilities and indicators of compromise. It’s an arms race between the threat actors using AI/ML, and the vendors that cybersecurity teams are depending on. The only answer is AI/ML based real-time, detections from across the now very large attack surface. 

Theme 2: Security and IT Automation 

The summit stage and the attendees I spoke to also referenced the growing importance of automation. Combining the speed of today’s business technology changes, software deployment methods and new security attacks and vulnerabilities, it’s critical that service providers, and IT pros implement more automation across all aspects of their business. With IT and cybersecurity, AIOps, and security event orchestration and response are increasingly automated.  

Speakers from both UiPath and F5 discussed ways to drive automation into all business processes and with today’s global threats coming at us 24/7 from a global perspective, automation is the only way to defend an organization. UiPath’s Gregory Williams even claimed that AI-enabled automation is a boardroom priority. 

Theme 3: The 2.0 Wave of Digital Transformation Adds AI and ML 

The final observation I have is that these two movements – attack surface expansion (due to digital transformation projects) and automation are driving a new wave of AI and ML driven changes to cybersecurity people, process, and technologies. When you combine the speed of new deployments with zero-day attacks and increasingly AI-powered attacks, plus the cybersecurity talent crunch, the only possible answer is to embed AI and ML-based protection, detection and response capabilities into the platforms security teams use to protect their organizations and clients. I am super excited that Seceon is perfectly positioned to support the teams that recognize this need and their deployments of Seceon aiSIEM and aiXDR acorss their environments. 

#IDSACIO Event Summary 

I thoroughly enjoyed the day with our partner Corr-Serve, their customers and partners, IDC analysts and the community here in South Africa. The need to transform security services and security operations centers is gaining momentum and I believe Seceon’s platform is the answer for the teams that need an efficient and effective platform that leverages their existing investments and due to our real-time AI/ML detection and response engines can be an effective way to scale coverage to the new attack surfaces. 

“I always enjoy this event, and this year the focus was less “digital transformation” and more about the new reality – of the need to modernize cybersecurity people, process, and technologies to protect and defend all of these new attack surfaces. The general consensus by the speakers and attendees was that it can only be accomplished with automation and AI and ML.’” said Mark van Vuuren is the Corr-Serve Product Director. 

To learn more about Seceon aiSIEM and aiXDR and how your organization and meet the needs of today’s cybersecurity challenges – be sure to schedule a demo with one of our engineers today.