Hong Kong’s corporate culture lags behind US, Europe in cybersecurity
Hong Kong has a ‘cybersecurity skills gap’, or a lack of qualified personnel that can communicate the importance of guarding against cyber attack to upper management
Hong Kong companies and financial services institutions lag behind the US and Europe in cybersecurity measures as little emphasis is placed on security from a board-level perspective, according to industry experts.
“Cybersecurity is not just an information technology problem, it is a CEO-level problem,” said Pierre Noel, chief security officer for Microsoft’s Enterprise Cybersecurity Group in Asia. “When you have a significant cybersecurity incident taking place, not only is IT impacted, operation, reputation and finance are impacted.”
A Forrester study commissioned by Microsoft found that a majority of financial services institutions surveyed in Asia-Pacific, including Hong Kong, lacked adequate knowledge of regulatory requirements when it came to using more secure services such as cloud computing. Instead, many continue to rely on traditional methods such as in-house data servers.
In particular, banks in Hong Kong tend to be more traditional and complacent when it comes to innovation and digital transformation, according to Forrester’s Research Director Frederic Giron.
He said the banking sector in Hong Kong had lagged in their uptake of cloud technology adoption.
“Not a lot of banks … are proactive or try to collaborate with regulators to shape cloud strategy,” said Giron.
Darren Argyle, chief information security officer of UK-based financial technology firm Markit, believes that Hong Kong banks and companies fall behind the US and Europe in beefing up cybersecurity even as the number of cyberattacks have been on the rise globally.