Businesses have been urged to prioritise risk management in their strategies and build effective cyber security mechanisms as the corporate world evolves very fast.

According to Acting Chief Risk and Compliance Officer for MTN Ghana, Winifred Setor-Smith, antagonists of digitalisation have caused increasing cyber-attacks which hinder the development of companies.

Speaking on the sides of the 2022 Innovare Joy Business Risk Summit Africa Conference, she admonished organisations to invest in cyber security to enable them to fully benefit from digitalisation.

“As we’re trying to make things easier through digitalisation, let us not forget that the bad actors out there trying to make their businesses better. So what we would see is that cyber-attacks increase. People would like to capitalise on the ease of digitisation, hence the need to prioritise cyber security”.

“What companies should do while digitalising their processes is ensuring that there are enough security measures in place. First of all, the fundamental control in cyber security is access control. We have a lot of dependencies on third parties in our infrastructure. How do we make sure that we’re focusing controls that would protect us from bad access within digitalisation programmes,” she said.

Risk Summit Africa held by Innovare, a Management Consultancy and Technology Services Company with support from Joy Business sought to highlight the importance of risk management and creating risk culture in companies especially amid growing cyber-attacks.

Chair of the summit, Enterprise Risk Management Consultant, Naa Adorkor Codjoe emphasised that a resilient company is one that involves risk management in their strategies.

“It is so critical for organisations to ensure that risk management is embedded across over their processes and systems, because what’s the essence of having a strategy if you don’t think about what could go wrong. If something goes wrong, it impacts your reputation, it impacts your bottom line and I think that companies can be derailed.”

“So, it is critical that when we’re setting our strategies, we should also pause to think about what could go wrong and also have in our organisations professionals to help us monitor and identify the risks involved. This will also help the organisations better situate itself, so it can thrive and become resilient. You can’t be resilient as an organisation without risk management processes,” she stressed.

Chief Executive of Innovare Group, C.K Bruce explained that the adoption of risk management by companies in Ghana is very low, the reason the summit was organised.

“Not many companies have risk management departments. Perhaps, only the banking industry but the industry is highly regulated. It is part of a regulatory requirement which makes them set up risk departments.”

“So the relevance and the adoption of risk management is still quite in early stages in Ghana. Hence, it’s important that we ensure that it is adopted more and more by all enterprises in all industries,” he highlighted.