Al Taqnyah Business Solutions, the leading specialist in providing powerful integrated solutions to the public and private sectors, has joined forces with London Global Associates (LGA) to underpin key IT security assurance, compliance and governance issues at the Government and Commercial level in the Middle East.
The new partnership will help business enterprises and government entities develop dynamic guidelines for their business processes with a performance based service model in mind. This is achieved through analysing core processes and key performance indicators (KPI) in every tier of a business unit, then tying them to leading governance, risk management and IT security compliances using local and international best practices.
“With Cyber-Crime costing firms globally $1 Trillion a year*, Non-transparency, misconduct, fraud and e-crime have been always seen as business challenges in global markets. However, since the recent global financial crisis and economic downturn, these challenges have become increasingly acute and are key issues to regional companies’ reputation, profitability, business sustainability and the overall global economic recovery. Taqnyah’s regional knowledge combined with LGAs Middle Eastern business and technical “know-how” will tackle such issues by establishing a regional e-crime Centre of Excellence with the aid of other Middle Eastern federal and commercial strategic partners” said Richard Gayle, Managing Director of London Global Associates MENA.
According to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Fraud Survey released by KPMG, last October, 40% of respondents out of a 2000 sample believed that Fraud and misconduct poses major problems when undertaking business in the Middle Eastern
region. While 60% expect the level to increase over the next two years. One of the reasons behind this thinking was the need to improve and underpin transparency, enterprise-risk management and Governance in the region.
Commenting on this partnership, Dr. Usman Zafar, Managing Director of Al Taqnyah Business Solutions said: “we are very pleased to introduce LGA, a company with a proven global record in governance, risk and compliance management services as a partner to address such issues in the Middle East region. Undoubtedly this partnership will add value to our unique portfolio of products. We are anticipating a long and fruitful relationship in tackling key issues in the realm of e-crime, risk and governance.”
London Global Associates is a United Kingdom headquartered SME IT consultancy, providing core services of governance/risk/compliance (GRC), IT security assurance services and business consultancy services tailored specifically for the business needs of financial, oil and gas, telecos and government entities in the Middle East.
“We are delighted to partner with Al Taqnyah Business Solutions considering their extensive resources in the region. Through this alliance we will build a collaborative partnership that is a foundation of business security and business compliance programmes. Both parties will assist companies to fight e-crime, spread awareness in card security and e-payment-processing security and support organisations in business compliance development.” added Gayle.
There has been a reported increase in credit card fraud, internal security breaches and other types of e-crimes. A recent study by Ponemon Institute has revealed that the costs in lost business opportunity accounted for 69% of the data breach costs, an average of $4.59 million, or $139 per record. The statistics are up 40% from the previous year.
According to the same Ponemon study, 44% of the study respondents reported high breaches by third parties such as outsources/offshorers, business partners, contractors, consultants as well as internal staff (employees). The per-victim costs for 3rd party breaches are about $52 higher than an insider employee breaches.
As local and international standards are changing the region, Al Taqnyah and LGA will be organizing a series of business conferences and workshops based on the market requirements to educate companies in this transformation of new regulations and guidelines which will be announced later in the year.
Al Taqnyah is founded on broad industry knowledge together with regional market expertise backed by world-class e-solutions and e-services. This has been done by partnering with leading organizations around the world without being tied to one specific technology vendor.
