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Have you ever asked yourself, "How quick do our sales team reply to our customers?", and "How long does it take the customers to respond to my sales team?" Do you know? I've been working in the customer service and sales sectors for about 15 years, and one of my pet hates is when companies do not get back to me as a consumer. Each of the companies I've worked for, during my career, would look for high performance from the sales and marketing teams by implementing KPI’s, Performance Metrics, Targets and SLA’s with the intent of maximising sales and customer satisfaction. The bottom line is getting always getting sales and showing a return on investment (ROI).

For business leaders in South Africa, corporate cybercrime is taking centre stage as a major risk to the enterprise. The ‘hacking economy’ is now thriving globally, and local businesses and organisations have been falling prey to sophisticated attacks for some time now. These attacks often come in the insidious forms of encryption and ransomware. Worryingly, for businesses that are already being challenged by a fragile socio-political environment, targeted cyber attacks can prove to be crippling. Often, the reputational damage cannot even be properly quantified. We have already seen major SA businesses, media organisations and government entities come under attack: here are some examples of hackers causing financial and political havoc in South Africa.

On his LinkedIn profile, Brian Pinnock is said to have a proven track record in technical, pre-sales, sales, pre-sales management and innovation management in enterprise-focused communication companies within the ICT industry. While this is true, Brian is also the high-spirited, inspirational mentor you can have a beer with while laughing at the curve balls life sometimes throws at you. One of the tricks in life, Brian explains to a laughing crowd, is to never to be the smartest person in the room for any length of time! Brian is the kind of guy that eats, breathes and lives security! It was during our latest Innovators’ Club meetup that Brian shared the lessons he learned throughout his journey to become one of the foremost cyber resilience experts in South Africa. The bottom line: For companies to be using first, second and third-generation technologies trying to protect themselves from fourth and fifth-generation attackers is no longer good enough. “Today, it’s like not even bringing a knife to a gunfight! – it’s like showing up naked to the duel.”

ICD Group wanted to create a more connected and collaborative work environment across its entities to facilitate the creation of cross-company mastermind groups and thereby engender innovative thinking. This compelled them to look into either Office 365 or G Suite for cloud email and collaboration requirements. In this instance, Grove as a Google partner offered ICD Group more hard-line value. Stacey Hines, Group Strategic Planner at ICD Group, elaborates that the primary drivers looking into G Suite Business was firstly the value proposition of a collaborative platform that could be leveraged across multiple companies in a relatively quick and straightforward way. “Secondly we were impressed by the time-saving benefit added to our IT-team members who would now be ‘free’ to work on other things instead of placing much focus on managing the on-premise email server and taking care of traditional Office Suite challenges.”