Local information security company Telspace Africa has announced leadership changes, with Dr Manuel Corregedor, previously chief operating officer, taking up the role of chief executive officer.
Corregedor replaced Dino Covotsos, founder of the company, as CEO, with the latter taking up the role of chairman of the board of Telspace Africa, which recently rebranded from Telspace Systems.
Tim Quintal has been appointed as chief operating officer of Telspace Africa.
Says Corregedor in an e-mail interview with ITWeb: “In the immediate term, we want to focus on further improving our current services and introducing new ones that we believe will add value to our clients and further enhance their security posture, while still remaining competitive within the African market.
“In the long-term, we are looking at making a significant and positive impact in our local and broader African industry clients; not just in terms of the types of services or products we deliver but also in terms of building up capability and skills locally.”
Prior to joining Telspace, Corregedor was a cyber security professional at Grindrod Bank, where he was responsible for incident management, information security management, information security awareness, operational security and PCI compliance.
Before his stint with Grindrod Bank, he was operations manager of Wolfpack Information Risk, where he was responsible for rolling out and managing training and awareness programmes, cyber threat research reports, information security management reviews and implementations, deploying business continuity management and incident management, and conducting IT or cyber security baseline assessments for organisations.
Corregedor’s appointment comes as South African organisations are increasingly being targeted by cyber criminals.
Some of the organisations that recently hit the headlines after suffering cyber attacks include Dis-Chem, TransUnion, Transnet, Experian and the Department of Justice.
This is due to a combination of things that have gone wrong across companies’ security controls in relation to their people, process and technology, says Corregedor.
“However, from my personal experience, I’ve found that it mostly happens when companies believe that technology alone will ensure they are secure – that it’s a silver bullet − but in reality organisations need to also ensure they have the right people and processes in place, or the technology will not be effective.
“Lastly, sometimes the issue is that organisations are doing security as part of a checkbox exercise, where all they are interested in is getting someone in that can issue a report so they can pass an audit, become compliant and so forth.
“Typically, such vendors don’t have the experience or skills required and end up giving organisations the incorrect advice and, as I like to say, sometimes it's better to have no advice at all than to be given the wrong advice by so-called ‘experts’.”
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