CASE
PROFILE
STUDY
YOU’VE GOT TO COLLABORATE, AND I
THINK MY STYLE IS VERY MUCH LIKE THAT.
I’ve spent the last couple of years developing
the leadership team, which has been critical.
A lot of people come from a technical
background in IT, like coders, but sometimes
they don’t have the managerial or visionary
style that is needed. But you can develop
people and I think that is key going forward.
What do you think is the
biggest cyberthreat facing
organisations today?
The biggest threat that we see in the
retail and credit environment is ransom
malware. We have our own cybersecurity
www.intelligentcio.com
centre where we have a lab monitoring
all our stores, the head office and user
behaviour. Also, data leak. In the UK, there
is GDPR, in South Africa we have POPI,
so we have to make sure that no data is
extracted out of our environment. And
with behaviour, if someone downloads
terabytes of data, it flags up straight away
in our cybersecurity centre. We can lock
someone’s machine down or go to the
person straight away.
We’ve got about 4,500 people in our head
office. Malware is the biggest one, but
second to that is internal threats and how to
protect yourself.
What can be done to tackle the skills
shortages in IT?
We have a bigger problem in South Africa
for a number of reasons. Through the
academic process, in schools, you can drop
mathematics and science after primary
school level, so people can’t get into
computer science and, if they did, they have
found it difficult. But a lot of companies are
starting academies to train people, so you
don’t have to go to university for four years.
We do try and get South Africans who have
been to the UK for seven years to come back
and entice them with bigger job offers and
we’ve been relatively successful. n
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