At the close of 2019, the World was awakened to a new and fast-spreading viral infection which was later named COVID-19 known to be caused by novel coronavirus. The disease which was initially discovered in Wuhan City, Hubei Province in central China quickly spread out of China to the rest of the World, gravely impacting many nations with a significant number of infections and fatalities. At the time of publication of this report (27th April 2020), the standing death toll was at 207,020 with total global infections at 2,995,734 in over 186 countries and still rising.
In an effort to curb the monstrous spread of the infections, many countries were forced to go into partial or total lockdowns with governments issuing strict work, trading, travel, and socializing guidelines. The Ugandan government equally issued strict movement and socializing guidelines that took effect for an initial 14 days starting 1st April 2020 but was later extended for another 21 days following fears of a possible surge in numbers. At the time of this publication, Uganda had registered 79 cases of infections with a total of 46 recoveries and no fatality.
The lockdown has had an immense impact on businesses of all nature. Many organization’s business continuity plans were put to test with many businesses either having insufficient strategies or completely non-existent. Due to the lockdown, many businesses were also forced to send their staff to work remotely while others completely shut down. The remote work and limited or no staffing in offices have got many businesses questioning their information security practice, information and communication technology (ICT) resilience in the event of a cyber-attack or system faults.
We at Milima Security, set out to understand how various businesses are coping with the impact of the pandemic on their business continuity. We took special attention to understand the kind of initiatives they are employing to ensure business continuity and missing areas that need to be fixed with immediate effect.
We are pleased to present to you this report which takes a deep dive into how Ugandan businesses are building information security structures and ensuring resilience in the face of a global pandemic which has greatly disrupted normal business operations.
This study presents results from 53 organizations surveyed. The surveyed come from various business sectors as represented in the respondent profiling. The companies were surveyed randomly and no particular bias was applied in selection process.
Download full report here