Technology

Besides the number of high-profile Cybersecurity breaches, which regularly feature in the financial news headlines, many local organisations have recently been hit by hacking, phishing or other malware attacks. This has resulted in a greater awareness and increased demand for cybersecurity advisory services. In the period under review, we have performed a number of information security audits for clients, including insurance companies and commercial banks. We also assisted a financial institution in building a cybersecurity framework with mechanisms to manage cyber-risks; monitor multiple risk factors; detect emerging risks; and measure cybersecurity against the corporate risk appetite. In addition, we assisted participants in a simulation of a cyberattack on national critical infrastructure and were engaged to carry out a number of penetration tests and vulnerability assessments on public facing IT systems.

The ever increasing risk awareness was also the key driver behind two assignments that involved the development of comprehensive Business Continuity Plans, one for an iGaming entity with operation centres in Malta and overseas and the other for a leading insurance company. The outcome provided comfort to management that the organisations would continue to operate in spite of adverse incidents.

Demand for Data and Analytics services that we launched relatively recently is growing strong. Notable assignments include the work we undertook at a local commercial bank in the validation of IFRS9 Expected Credit Loss (ECL) provisions through the use of data analytics to ensure that the results of the ECL process provided by the implemented system are reasonable when challenged by the off-system re-calculation model. We also assisted clients in leveraging the power of data and analytics to ensure that information generated by certain key processes (e.g. revenue) from their operational systems is accurate and complete.

In recent years the PwC team providing IT Managed Services as an outsourced IT Function has grown significantly. These services eliminate many of the issues clients face when having to maintain a fully-fledged team of in-house IT specialists particularly in a market where such skills are in high demand.

In recent years, the majority of projects handled involved migrating systems to the Cloud, typically starting from email and other collaboration tools. Several clients have successfully moved all systems and software off-premises, reducing the cost of administration and maintenance and getting flexibility to scale the IT infrastructure in sync with the business, making IT a variable cost. An added benefit is the facility to have all systems typically available from anywhere, on the road, while travelling abroad or from home for staff that want or need a more flexible schedule.

In the period under review we also helped clients in different sectors through strategy, planning, piloting, migrating, training and deployment to enable a smooth transition from in-house systems to cloud-based services with minimal disruption to their business. As an on-going service, our IT team focuses on the availability of services and particularly network capacity, using automated monitoring and reporting to push the IT infrastructure and systems upkeep to a background activity about which our clients do not need to be as concerned.