As we move from the information era to the digital era, the network continues to grow in relevance. It connects all things digital and is the lifeblood of digital business. If the network foundation crumbles, the business will be crippled. Digital transformation, the connection of people, businesses and things through technology has become very critical for the economic development of the Maghreb, West, and Central African regions.
According to Forrester, nearly four out of five business leaders believe that IT has the responsibility to ensure the network can support the company’s digital plans. Yet, 67% of businesses believe the current network is the bottleneck.
The highly reliable and resilient networks that have served businesses for the past 30 years simply cannot scale for the digital demands of 5.4 billion mobile users by 2020, 30 billion IoT devices by 2020, big data storage reaching 73 Exabytes by 2019, and 57% of organisations using or planning to use the cloud.
These figures are very important for encouraging growth opportunities in the region. Equally so, we need to start building the skills for the future workforce to be able to operate in a digitally transformed region. That is why in Morocco we trained 11,767 students via our networking academy, our flagship corporate social responsibility programme in fiscal 2016, of which 33% were female in order to make sure that we encouraged a digitised workforce.
We will be highlighting the need to enable the future workforce to catapult in a digitally transformed region. Customers are needing more and more of guidance and thought leadership as they adopt to digital transformation.
“According to Forrester four out of five business leaders believe that IT has responsibility to ensure networks can support company’s digital plans”
“67% of businesses believe current network is the bottleneck”
“Reliable networks that served businesses for past 30 years simply cannot scale for digital demands”
“We need to start building skills for the future workforce to be able to operate in digitally transformed region”
The rise of technology has presented new challenges for Morocco and Africa as a whole. One such risk that requires direct attention and action is cybercrime. Cybersecurity experts predict that 80% of Africa’s PC’s are infected by viruses and malicious software.
At Cisco, we believe there are two types of organisations, those that have been attacked and know that they are attacked, and those that have been attacked and do not know it. The most popular of these cybercrimes in our region is phishing and instances of malware attacks.
This is why new security services and cloud-based security solutions have been built with Cisco’s threat-centric security architecture to assist customers to prevent, fight and recover from cybercrimes. From the network to the endpoint to the cloud, Cisco’s architectural approach detects threats and helps customers on average reduce their time to detection to less than 17 hours. This is much faster than industry standard of 100 days.
Our customers are finding that they need a more integrated approach to security, and vendors can provide them with a threat-centric security architecture that is much more effective in a digital world.
“Customers are finding they need a more integrated approach to security”
“From network to endpoint to cloud, an architectural approach detects threats and reduces time to detection to less than 17 hours”
The Maghreb, West and Central regions of Africa are preparing for digital transformation as well as looking at new security architectures to ward off cybercrime explains Abdelilah Nejjari from Cisco Maghreb. This blog may have been edited for style and conciseness.
