ABSTRACT:
African governments and businesses must accept the concept of Internet of Everything (IoE) by being fully digitized with highly robust computer network security in order to embrace modern technologies in the form of cloud, mobile, social and analytics. They must also realize the importance attached to achieving societal and economic transformation by fully understanding the connection between people, process, data and things in order to create the needed opportunities for African citizens. A country’s Networked Readiness is an ideal indicator of a country’s ability to implement and take a competitive advantage of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). In this article we investigate 6 sub-Saharan Africa countries (Botswana, Mauritius, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe) in terms of their Networked Readiness Index (NRI) rankings as published in the Global Information Technology Reports (GITR) from 2002 – 2015. We developed a number of statistical models for predicting the NRI for these countries for the next 9 years based on the NRI rankings of these countries in the previous 9 years. Our predictive models for NRI rankings suggest that on average over next the 9 years, the hierarchical ordering is namely, Mauritius (1st), South Africa (2nd), Zimbabwe (3rd), Namibia (4th), Botswana (5th) and Nigeria (6th) respectively. We conclude that in terms of Networked Readiness in Africa during the period of our predictions, data security will be crucial in three areas: confidentiality, integrity and availability. Furthermore, we are of the opinion that programmable security infrastructure (software-based security environment) will have the ability to secure dynamically a particularly sensitive data flow across the network on demand and according to the organization’s security policy.
Keywords: Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), Networked Readiness Index (NRI), Security, Regression Analysis, Sub-Saharan Africa.
