By Albert Allotey
Accra, April 24, GNA – The National Information Technology Agency (NITA) has signed partnership arrangement with Smar tInfraco and Trend Micro for the provision of antivirus services for the government.
The partnership is aimed at empowering government organisations with robust cybersecurity solutions, ensuring a secure and resilient digital ecosystem that can withstand potential cybersecurity threats.
Mr Richard Okyere-Fosu, the Director General of NITA who signed the agreement on behalf of the Agency said cyber threats had become a global menace and came in various forms, which spread viruses and crippled government systems and services.
He said: “A case in point is the internet outage we experienced mid-March of this year.
“The risk these systems and applications pose to our economy and daily lifestyle is ever growing and we as a nation needs to take deliberate steps to properly profile the risk element and have comprehensive mitigation measures that is forward-looking as part of our national business continuity plan.”
Mr Okyere-Fosu said NITA has deployed several cybersecurity measures to keep the integrity of the digital infrastructure and applications of government, but antivirus service was one of the missing components for security model.
“This is why this partnership comes at a very opportune time. We are hoping that the antivirus services will keep the integrity of systems and end nodes within government domain and prevent some of the cybersecurity incidents we have been confronted with in the past,” he stated.
He said NITA’s assessment showed that just a little over 30 per cent of government systems and end nodes (computers) have the right antivirus setup, stating that this posed a great deal of risk to government in its agenda to fully digitalize the economy.
“It is in the face of such risk that NITA as part of our mandate have over the past few years collaborated with partners within the public and private sector to roll out a series of interventions to address information and cybersecurity in general across the public sector space,” the Director said.
Mr Okyere-Fosu observed that government purchased Trend Micro service some years back as part of the deployment of the eGovernment infrastructure and the partnership rode on the back of the long-standing relationship and even deepened it further by choosing the Managed Service Provider, which was a more cost-effective and value for money approach to government.
Mr Mazen Al-Adhami of Trend Micro and Mr Harkirit Singh, Chief Executive Officer of Smart Infraco said they would work together to support NITA with the provision of robust cybersecurity solutions, ensuring a secure and resilient digital ecosystem that could withstand potential cybersecurity threats in Ghana.
“Smart Infraco as a technical partner of NITA, will install Trend Antivirus Servers at the two national Data Centres to efficiently deliver antivirus services to government agencies nationwide,” Mr Singh stated.
Mr Al-Adhami said leveraging on Trend Micro’s innovative suite, Smart Infraco would offer government organisations worry-free cybersecurity, saying; “This will include endpoint security for defending against ransomware and advanced attacks, email security for real-time protection against targeted attacks, spam, phishing, and viruses.
Present at the signing of the partnership were Mr Alexander Yaw Arphul, Chief Director of the Ministry of Communications and Digitalization and Dr Antwi-Boasiako, Director General of Cyber Security Authority.
They expressed happiness of the agreement and congratulated the partners for the initiative.
The initiative would enforce compliance with security architecture, and safeguard government data and infrastructure against cyber threats.
Smart Infraco is the technical partner of NITA providing cutting-edge technology and infrastructure to accelerate the pace of digitalisation in Ghana and offers over 1,000km of high-speed fibre along the eastern corridor of the country Ghana, a secure Tier 3 data centre infrastructure with backup and disaster recovery, as well as digital solutions that enable businesses and government institutions realise their true digital potential.
GNA