In the aisles of the Radisson Blu hotel in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, entrepreneurs, bankers and experts in digital tools jostle. With increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, digital defense is now becoming essential.
First problem: the organizers of the forum estimate that only 20% of African countries have adopted a legal framework to thwart this cybercrime.
For Fabrice Zapfack, technical director of data354, a data management consulting firm, awareness of the issue must be accelerated. ” Most businesses and organizations view data protection from a compliance perspective. For them, it’s more of a constraint than anything else. Data protection can be an accelerator, because it leads organizations to ask themselves the right questions. »
The expert remains optimistic in view of companies in full digital transformation, which can pull up the cyber protection market. Like Orange, very present in the territory.
The CEO of Orange Bank Africa, Jean-Louis Menann-Kouamé, insists on three pillars: prevention, rapid reaction and regular monitoring. “ There are a few countries that make the effort to have specialized training institutions. This is the case of Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Congo and even Gabon. It is good that these countries have cybersecurity schools, but it would be better if they were regional or even continental and that the best practices were taught there. »
Awareness is spreading, but slowly. Less than 1% of African GDP is allocated to digital defense, according to Yakhya Diop, technical director of Senegalese cybersecurity company CCDOC. For him, Africa is not up to speed, but it is not late for all that: “ We are not late, because we have more intellectuals, we have more young people. We will take the opportunity to train them very young, to make them understand that this is the future. We will talk to them about blockchain, bitcoins, artificial intelligence. All this data must be studied in cybersecurity so that it is better protected. »
A cybersecurity whose market amounted to 2 billion dollars in 2020.
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