Agile Networks’ managing director Darragh Richardson. Image via Luke Maxwell
Agile Networks’ managing director Darragh Richardson warns Siliconrepublic.com that many Irish firms are underprepared for cyberattacks – distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, in particular.
Not enough preparation; not enough investment; not enough responsibility taken. That’s the view of Agile Networks when it comes to Irish businesses defending themselves against cyberattacks.
Richardson, whose company annually surveys its customers about their attitudes and responses to cyberattacks, is wary.
Finding almost half those surveyed reported DDoS attacks as something they had to deal with in the past 12 months, “it’s a clear and present danger”, he said.
“It gets coverage in the press, it’s high on the CIO agenda.”
However, Richardson said he would be worried about how well prepared most enterprises are. “We found only 30pc of our clients have budget set aside for DDoS attacks,” he said, despite almost half encountering such an issue.
This comes on the back of a recent global report of businesses that found a spike in ransomware attacks. The result was 40pc reporting ransomware attacks, with a spike of 249pc in the last six months of 2015.
“Companies don’t view it as their responsibility,” said Richardson. “Only 4pc see themselves as primarily responsible.”
During the summer, Agile Networks was awarded a seven-year contract worth €5m by HEAnet to deliver an ultra-high bandwidth network to serve 1m students and staff across the Irish education and research sector.
The new network will have 100GB capacity and will be capable of carrying ultra-high bandwidth traffic. The rollout will take place over an 18-month period to 200 locations nationwide, with five years of support.
“Our main strengths are twofold,” said Richardson. “We work across a lot of vendors. We also deal a lot with the service providers. We can close the gap between what service providers and what enterprises are doing.”
