How Will the Russia-Ukraine Conflict Affect the IT Industry?

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has provided recommendations for companies, especially those working with Ukrainian or Russian organizations. Here are the key takeaways:

• Analyze your company’s remote access. Ensure that all the access requires multi-factor authentication.
• Ensure that your company’s IT personnel have disabled all the ports and protocols that are not necessary for business. 
• Keep a check on possible intrusions. Advice all your IT personnel to be vigilant about any unusual network behavior.
• Have good antivirus software to protect your organization’s network. Ensure all the signatures in these tools are updated. 
• If you’re working with Ukrainian organizations, closely monitor the traffic and be extra vigilant. 
• Ensure you have a crisis-management team in place to respond to any intrusion and mitigate the damage in the case of a cyber-attack.
• Ensure you test your backup procedures to restore critical data after the cyber attack. Be sure to store the backups away from the network connections. 
• Lastly, plan for the worst! Ensure your organization is prepared to protect critical assets and disconnect high-impact parts of the network if necessary. 

You can take a look at the detailed cybersecurity recommendations published by Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) here. 

Several companies around the globe have their corporate offices and research centers in Russia and Ukraine or are dependent on the workforce in these countries. 

Post the invasion, the sanctions may lead to the loss of government support for Russian and Ukrainian organizations and R&D centers. With hundreds of millions of dollars invested by companies to create a developer and reseller channel in Russia, this development may result in substantial losses for the industry. In addition, IT companies may have to infuse funds to mitigate the risk of a possible digital war in the case of a prolonged invasion.

Turing stands in solidarity with all those impacted by this unprovoked war. We stand united in the name of peace.