Monthly Archives: June 2026

By Staff Writer

October’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month presents an ideal opportunity for South African businesses to review existing security measures and consider how they might be improved.

Cybersecurity risks are becoming more advanced and sophisticated worldwide.

The rise of generative AI and intelligent social engineering strategies is exposing new vulnerabilities in everyday systems, with 72% of organisations believing risks have increased in recent years.

South African businesses face unique challenges, ranging from infrastructural and financial constraints to a 14% year-over-year increase in cyber-attacks nationwide.

In addition, a 2024 report found as many as 63% of cybersecurity roles in the nation are partially or fully unfilled.

The importance of security convergence

As the digital and physical worlds become more interconnected, businesses are afforded new opportunities to merge previously siloed technologies.

This practice, known as security convergence, is instrumental in bridging the gap between cyber and physical security.

In a converged security environment, physical and cybersecurity solutions are controlled and managed within a unified, integrated platform.

Stakeholders are empowered to consider how changes made to aspects of one system could expose vulnerabilities in the other, promoting knowledge-sharing and skill development across both physical and cybersecurity practices.

Security convergence is becoming increasingly important as physical security technologies become more advanced.

Modern security devices like cameras and access control systems leverage intelligent analytics, AI and cloud management features to improve awareness and speed up threat responses, but their reliance on web connectivity can expose vulnerabilities.

By taking a converged approach to security, leaders can benefit from smart technologies while minimising cyber-risks.

At the same time, they can help teams experienced in physical security understand more about contemporary cybersecurity risks, best practices and trends.

The benefits of converged security systems

64% of surveyed South African companies agree that shortages in dedicated cybersecurity roles are creating more cyber threats, leaving local businesses exposed to targeted attacks.

Pursuing internal security convergence enables businesses to upskill existing security teams in the field of cybersecurity while equally strengthening responses to physical security risks.

The benefits of security convergence include:

• Improved threat detection: In an integrated system, suspicious activities can be observed in real-time across both practices, helping to address threats proactively.
• Faster incident responses: Real-time communication between cyber and physical security systems enables teams to enact swifter, better-informed incident responses.
• Streamlined management: By providing teams with a holistic view of all active security systems, businesses can reduce the complexity of day-to-day security management.
• Reduced operational costs: Integrating both practices helps to reduce bloat and promote streamlined system management, often resulting in lower operational costs.
• Strengthened security posture: With a holistic view of all security systems and measures it becomes easier to perform comprehensive risk assessments and audits.

Efforts to pursue security convergence can help South African businesses address growing cybersecurity concerns while equally enhancing physical security responses.

In addition, businesses position themselves to make effective use of cutting-edge security technologies.

Core technologies in a converged security system

To successfully build a converged security system and bridge the gap between cyber and physical security, business leaders must leverage a few important technologies and devices.

Unified management platforms

To effectively manage a converged security system, leaders must combine the operation of all physical and cybersecurity technologies within a unified management platform.

An ideal solution will enable operators to link access control, video security, intrusion detection and cybersecurity systems in a centralized platform that can be accessed by operators remotely.

Smart security cameras

Smart security cameras like the Avigilon H6A Dual Head leverage AI-powered analytics to keep operators informed of suspicious motion and sounds consistent with threats.

When connected to a unified management platform, teams can receive real-time alerts and view feeds remotely, with dual camera sensors providing maximal coverage over target areas.

Access control systems

Intelligent access control systems help to prevent unauthorized access events by securing high-risk areas behind traceable credentials.

Avigilon access control solutions can work in tandem with our video security systems to improve situational awareness.

Users can visually verify access events and review logs remotely from an integrated management platform.

Intelligent analytics solutions

AI analytics solutions empower operators to identify and respond to potential threats across both physical and cyber environments, supporting prompt responses and informed decision-making across converged security systems.

Solutions can also be used to monitor network traffic across digital platforms to address suspicious user activity and combat cyber-attacks.

A proactive approach to physical and cybersecurity

Working with a trusted third-party vendor like Avigilon can help South African businesses bridge the gap between cyber and physical security.

By developing a converged security system built using proactive components designed to work in unison, leaders can improve awareness and address complex threats swiftly across cyber and physical environments.

Article Source: Bridging the gap between cybersecurity and physical security in South Africa – MyBroadband

Presented by SmartCrypto

Cybersecurity teams spend millions trying to keep attackers out. Modern security strategy assumes they’ll get in anyway.

Whether through a software vulnerability, a phishing campaign, a compromised third party, or a stolen credential, the question is no longer whether attackers can reach your systems. It’s what they find when they do.

The 2026 Thales Data Threat Report found that 67% of security teams are already seeing credential theft and misappropriated secrets on the rise.

If your cryptography is working correctly, the answer is nothing useful.

Stolen data is unreadable. Transactions can’t be forged. Identities can’t be impersonated.

That’s not a theoretical argument. It’s the only reliable safety net when perimeter controls fail.

The problem is that implementing and operating cryptography at enterprise scale is genuinely hard. Most businesses don’t have the people to do it properly.

The sprawl you probably haven’t mapped

Think about where encryption lives in your environment right now.

• Your databases encrypt sensitive records.
• Your APIs exchange signed tokens.
• Your payment systems run through hardware security modules.
• Your cloud platforms have their own key management services.
• Your certificates secure communication across applications and identities.

Now ask: who owns all of that? Who tracks it? Who knows when a certificate is about to expire?

For most enterprises, the honest answer is: nobody does. Not fully.

Encryption underpins everything from payment systems and cloud workloads to digital identities and API security.

According to the 2026 Thales Data Threat Report, only 34% of security teams know where all their data is stored, and 46% are managing five or more separate key management systems.

The keys, certificates and trust infrastructure behind your encryption are almost certainly fragmented across your environment.

The term the industry has settled on for this is cryptographic sprawl.

It’s not dramatic. It’s what happens when encryption is treated as a feature of individual systems rather than a discipline in its own right.

The consequences are quiet but costly: certificates expire unexpectedly and take down critical services.

Keys aren’t rotated because nobody knows what depends on them. Compliance audits expose gaps that nobody knew existed.

Hardware security modules are the physical devices that generate and store the root cryptographic keys protecting your most sensitive systems, and they’re among the hardest components to move or modernise.

Banks know this better than most.

While application workloads shift to the cloud, HSM infrastructure tends to sit exactly where it was installed, often without the operational expertise that the original implementation team brought with them.

A different model

SmartCrypto has introduced Managed Cryptographic Services (MCS) in South Africa.

The idea is simple: cryptographic infrastructure shouldn’t be something your team also has to run.

MCS delivers three core capabilities as managed services:

• HSM as a Service – enterprise-grade hardware security modules hosted at Teraco, delivered with full key management and operational support
• PKI as a Service – managed public key infrastructure for certificate issuance, lifecycle management and trust hierarchy
• Key Management as a Service – centralised key management covering cloud and on-premise environments

Your team gets the capability. SmartCrypto manages the complexity.

As a Thales Platinum Partner and one of a small number of Thales Level 1 Support Partners globally, SmartCrypto builds its services on the same cryptographic stack used by the world’s largest banks and payment networks: the Luna Network HSM, the payShield payment HSM, and the CipherTrust Data Security Platform.

In fact, SmartCrypto is the first provider in Africa to deliver HSM infrastructure as a hosted, managed service.

For procurement, that’s one vendor relationship covering the full cryptographic stack.

The thread connecting it all

SmartCrypto’s approach is built on a nine-layer architectural model called the Crypto Framework. At its core is a concept called the Golden Thread.

Every identity in your environment needs to be cryptographically bound to the data it accesses.

That applies to users, devices, applications and services alike. When that chain is intact, access is verified by cryptography, not assumed.

That’s the technical reality of Zero Trust: not a product, not a policy document, but a cryptographic property of your infrastructure.

The framework structures how that property gets built, maintained and governed, from the hardware root of trust through to compliance and operational oversight.

Starting right for what’s coming

The transition to post-quantum cryptography is no longer a distant concern.

NIST finalised its first post-quantum algorithm standards in 2024, and regulatory guidance is following.

The “harvest now, decrypt later” threat is already active.

Adversaries are collecting encrypted traffic today on the assumption they’ll be able to break it once quantum computing matures.

The same Thales report found that 61% of security professionals already cite this as their top quantum concern.

For financial institutions, healthcare providers and anyone holding long-lived sensitive data, that’s not a theoretical risk.

The practical step most security teams should be taking now isn’t waiting for quantum to arrive.

It’s achieving cryptographic agility: the ability to rotate algorithms, replace keys and update trust infrastructure without rebuilding systems from scratch.

That means centralising key management, automating certificate lifecycle processes and establishing clear ownership of cryptographic systems.

The teams best positioned to respond the future challenges of quantum computing are those with centralised key management and certificate lifecycle processes already in place.

MCS provides that foundation now, so algorithm transitions are manageable when the time comes.

Article source: Why managed cryptographic services will become the next evolution of cybersecurity – MyBroadband