ASEAN organizations dealing with growing cyber menace

Sponsored Post Organizations across the Asia Pacific need to urgently ramp up their IT security infrastructures in response to a significantly increasing level of cyber threats, security experts have warned.

Cloudflare - which specializes in content delivery networks, cloud cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and ICANN-accredited domain registration – cautions that "organizations of every size, in every industry, and every market" across the ASEAN region (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, and rest of ASEAN) are suffering from a hike in the volume and severity of cyber threats.

The July 2023 Cloudflare whitepaper, Securing the Future: Asia Pacific Cybersecurity Readiness Survey, reveals that over three-quarters (78 per cent) of the more than 4,000 cybersecurity professionals interviewed from 14 markets across the region have fallen victim to at least one cybersecurity incident in the past 12 months. Almost the same number (76 per cent) said that the number of incidents had risen. Some 80 per cent of respondents reported experiencing four or more incidents, and half experienced more than 10, with web attacks emerging as the number-one threat.

The report added that, in addition to the surge in total attack volume, the number of threat vectors is continuing to multiply in an increasingly hybrid working world. As organizations rely more on distributed IT infrastructure and embrace distributed / hybrid work, the complexity of securing an organization with a mish-mash of security solutions is growing at an untenable rate.

Grant Bourzikas, Cloudflare's SVP & Chief Security Officer, notes that the cybersecurity architectures implemented by organizations across the ASEAN region are often a "patchwork" of multiple poorly integrated point-based solutions. However, he explains that complex and disjointed security hinders the growth of modern, distributed organizations and "increasing the number of solutions in the face of growing threats does not appear to be an effective response".

Recognizing the increasing redundancy of multiple point-based security solutions in the face of today's hybrid cyber threats, Cloudflare has engineered what is believes is a comprehensive centralized security services platform to help organizations lock down cyber protection. Dubbed Everywhere Security, it features a unified global platform that delivers cloud-native Zero Trust, application and API protection, email security, and network security services run on every server in every datacenter of the company's 310-city network.

Everywhere Security can help organizations neutralize cyber-attacks across every stage of the attack lifecycle and for any endpoint, infrastructure or resource, says Cloudflare. It delivers attack surface protection, zero-day attack prevention and zero trust frameworks which span hybrid work environments, for example, while the unified platform of programmable cloud-native security services can also coordinate protection across the internet, apps and corporate networks.

Cloudflare calculates that it serves and secures roughly one-fifth of global internet traffic, which means it can automatically apply the resulting threat intelligence across all of its cybersecurity services. This improves threat visibility while reducing redundant alerts, says the company, while the composable cloud platform makes it easy to adopt new services and security models (including Zero Trust).

With the support of suppliers like Cloudflare, ASEAN organizations can work in line with the ASEAN Digital Masterplan 2025, which seeks to drive the region's digital cooperation and transform the region into a leading economic bloc powered by secure and transformative digital services.  

To read more about Cloudflare's cyber security readiness report, click here.

Sponsored by Cloudflare.