Cyber security is the responsibility of a company’s administrators, not the IT department, and board members need to be aware of the importance of allocating a budget to protect systems and equipment.
“Digitalization comes with a cost that is not small, and cybersecurity costs are increasing more and more. These costs vary from 15 to 20% of a company’s budget, and in Romania the IT budget is below 1% compared to the level of 5% in the West. This may lead you to think that only the cyber segment can reach 1% of revenues. It’s not little, but the costs are increasing because unfortunately the bad guys are always one step ahead of us,” said Yugo Neumorni, president of the CIO Council, during the DigitALL 2023 conference, organized by Energynomics.
He added that in recent years there has been a positive evolution from this point of view, “but there is still a lot to do”.
“Awareness is very important – programs to make all employees of a company aware of the fact that any mobile device is a time bomb, that any e-mail can be a vector of entry into the organization. Awareness and business continuity are things that can save us from disasters, they are things that can give confidence that the business will be valid even if a cyber attacker enters, especially in the energy area”, said Neumorni.
Moreover, in Europe there are still power plants and factories where the IT systems are not integrated with the operational technology (OT) area, which is “absolutely abnormal”, from the point of view of the cited expert. In addition, the vast majority of power plants in Europe are old systems, and in Romania there are still systems operating with 50-year-old SCADA, which creates cyber security risks.
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“A disaster recovery plan for the IT area is quite complicated, but at the moment it is widespread. It’s not the same in the OT area, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to do it,” said Neumorni.
The DigitALL 2023 conference was organized by Energynomics, in partnership with the CIO Council and with the support of our partners Eaton Electric, Huawei, NextGen, Schneider Electric, Siemens.