Most Ghanaian banks are vulnerable to hacking because they do not employ cloud software to store their data, Darrel Orsmond, Head of Banking Industry at Systems, Applications and Products (SAP) Africa, has noted.
Making this known at an event to mark its innovation day recently in Accra, he said banks in Ghana access their data from their servers, which are mostly located in one of the bank’s branch offices instead of cloud software that has been adopted by developing countries, including South Africa and Kenya.
He said that unlike cloud centers that deal with all levels of securities, banks in Ghana choose only one or two levels of security, which makes them vulnerable to hackers.
“The banks in Ghana have large legacy problems like a lot of banks across Africa, they have built one piece of software system that does savings account, there’s another one that does credit cards, and another does HR and sometimes they haven’t got a finance system and a lot of excel spread sheets,” Mr Orsmond said.
Owing to such a situation, Head of Technology at SAP Africa, Simon Carpenter, urged governments in Africa to put in place mechanisms to benefit from global technology boom.
He, however, spoke about companies on the Fortune 500 List that were not immune to hacking, noting that “52% of the Fortune 500 firms are gone due to disruptive technology and innovations.”
In spite of that, he said the world was fast moving towards employing technological solution to economic challenges.
Mr Carpenter said Ghana would soon deploy the 5G spectrum and for him that should be a game changer for the economy.
“By 2020, information will be used to reinvent, digitise and eliminate 80 percent of business processes from a decade earlier.”
He also touched on the age of hyper-connectivity and the prediction that there would be about 3 to 5 billion people on social networks by 2020.