Over one-third (39%) of geographically distributed companies in the Middle East, Turkiye and Africa (META) region identify building and maintaining a cohesive IT infrastructure across multiple sites as their primary concern, according to a new Kaspersky survey. At the same time, 23% of businesses consider ensuring comprehensive information protection of all their offices most significant challenge.
The recent Kaspersky’s report ‘Managing geographically distributed businesses: challenges and solutions’ provides a deeper insight into the network and information security challenges faced by geo-distributed companies and highlights solutions organizations employ to overcome these difficulties.[1]
According to this report, the majority of respondents in the META region clearly prioritized technological aspects when referring to the main challenges they face while operating geo-distributed companies. Among those surveyed, 39% said that building and maintaining a coherent IT infrastructure across multiple sites is their primary concern, while 23% stated that ensuring comprehensive information security across all assets and processes posed the most significant challenge for them.
Top challenges faced by geo-distributed organisations
When considering IT infrastructure and information security issues, it is notable that 40% of experts identify incident detection and response as a primary hurdle when addressing cybersecurity issues across multiple sites. More than one third struggle with effectively implementing security measures (37%) and building a cohesive security policy (37%).
Among other technological problems respondents also mentioned were the set-up and integration of new sites into the existing network, the high costs of hiring IT personnel, a disparate suite of security management tools and longer recovery times after system failures, etc.
"The figures from our research show that providing consistent network and information security across multiple geographically dispersed offices is a daunting task for distributed organizations. Local regulation and legislation, varying resources and expertise at corporate headquarters and branch offices, coupled with a lack of effective network and cybersecurity tools, can place a significant burden on those specialists trying to implement and maintain uniform security standards and consistent network configuration. To address this challenge, companies should apply solutions that enable centralized and automated network management and provide comprehensive protection of all offices, regardless of their location", comments Maxim Kaminsky, Business Development Manager of Secure Access Service Edge at Kaspersky.
To protect geo-distributed companies from cyber threats and minimize the possibility of network problems, Kaspersky experts recommend the following:
- Use specialized solutions like Kaspersky SD-WAN, which manages the entire corporate network from a single console. This solution converges separate communication channels and network functions across companies, facilitating the construction of reliable networks and enabling connection of new branches with a zero-touch experience.
- Employ centralized and automated solutions such as Kaspersky Next XDR Expert to ensure comprehensive cyber protection of all company assets and processes both at HQ and local offices. By aggregating and correlating data from multiple sources in one place and leveraging machine learning technologies, this solution provides effective threat detection and rapid automated response.
The full report with more findings on the challenges facing geo-distributed companies is available via this link.
[1] Within this research, Kaspersky questioned 1,000 respondents from 20 countries: Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Mexico, USA, France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Singapore, China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia.
