The Covid-19 pandemic has driven digitization across industries such as transportation, healthcare, energy, and education, and now technology company Cisco is working to optimize the hybrid work system.
At its Cisco Live conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the company recently said it was moving from digitizing manual processes to focusing on experience and automation, in order to free up time and increase productivity.
The coming year presents many challenges, including exponentially increasing security risks, in part due to geopolitical turmoil, said Wendy Mars, CEO of Cisco Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
“The economy faces challenges in many of our countries and we have inflation at a 40-year high. We also have an energy crisis that we are trying to manage as citizens and within our businesses, while feeling increased pressure on sustainability,” Mars said.
Despite these challenges, including in the supply chain, Mars said the company needed to focus on the growing digital skills gap. Cisco announced a 10-year goal for the EMEA region to upskill 10 million people in the digital and cybersecurity space, under the Cisco Networking Academy.
Three million will be trained in Africa, Reem Asaad, vice president of Cisco EMEA told the Mail and Guardian.
“The youth of today will be the green engineers of tomorrow. We need engineers with new skill sets to build solar panels and wind turbines, sustainability offices and become new energy analysts,” Asaad said.
On the African continent, Cisco first launched its national digital acceleration program in South Africa, followed by Egypt.
“We started in South Africa because it has the most short-term promise for growth and opportunity. We opened our Edge center there that is dedicated not only to training and education, but also to mentoring and management consulting to help small businesses thrive,” said Guy Diedrich, global innovation officer.
“The challenge in South Africa is how to take an already young, agile, well-educated and ambitious population and give it a path to success.”
Cisco says that around 45% of the world remains disconnected and Africa would be a big part of the equation in trying to address that.
“We would lift 500 million people out of poverty and at the same time contribute $6.7 trillion to global GDP,” Diedrich said. “It’s not just the ethical and moral thing to do, it’s also the economically prudent thing to do in the digital age.”
hybrid work
Hybrid work is still a difficult experiment and different from the way people have worked in recent years, Cisco says.
Businesses need to rethink employee experiences, workplaces and new security attacks that seem to be spreading, said Javed Khan, general manager of the Cisco Collaboration.
“It requires a holistic approach across networking, security, collaborative software and hardware – that’s the future of work,” Khan said, adding that the solution lies in reinventing workspaces at home or in the office; Optimize collaboration in an ecosystem to enable new types of interaction and ensure that the business is protected.
Cybersecurity is a big factor in hybrid work, Asaad said, citing Cisco’s 2022 Consumer Security Survey, which showed that nearly 37% of users had no idea what multi-factor authentication is and, worryingly, , about half received safety tips from family and friends.
“The level of proficiency when it comes to security is a concern, but we are seeing more cyber security trends in our region, which is very security conscious; there is a great need for it,” Asaad said.
working with the government
Cisco has a team that works closely with the South African government to understand and promote policy making around cybersecurity policies, data sovereignty, and data privacy.
“We operate in more than 90 countries and can bring our knowledge and experience to bear on how we help other governments shape their policies to safeguard their countries,” Asaad said.
“South Africa has a lot of power outage issues so we are trying to work with the government and its entities like Eskom to help build a reliable grid with more business continuity so you don’t have additional challenges on top of power challenges.” .
The Cisco Networking Academy, launched at the South African State Information Technology Agency in 2010, has since trained more than 1.5 million people, more than a third of them women.
In the Middle East and Africa region, South Africa has the highest percentage of female participation, with 46% enrolled in IT, cybersecurity and Internet of Things courses, Asaad said.
