SIMPLICITY in cybersecurity is critical for stretched Pacific Islands information technology teams facing increasingly complex artificial intelligence (AI) threats on tight budgets, said Barracuda Networks Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Islands vice-president Dan McLean.
Speaking at the 2026 Fiji Tech Summit at the InterContinental Fiji Golf Resort and Spa yesterday, Mr McLean said the rapid explosion of AI had accelerated the pace and scale of global cyberattacks.
While online services and threats have grown over the past year, he said regional organisations had not gained extra staff or larger budgets to manage them.
He added that complexity often created maintenance hurdles, training gaps and vulnerabilities within organisations, adding that ease of use had been a core ethos of Barracuda Networks for more than a decade.
“I didn’t mean that fixing cybersecurity and technology challenges is easy, they are incredibly hard. Rather, ease of use must be a critical part of the solution because complexity is often what creates the problem,” Mr McLean said.
To build cyber resiliency, he urged organisations to protect their front door by securing email, identity, websites, applications and customer portals, alongside maintaining reliable data recovery and 24-hour monitoring.
He highlighted a recent global PHP vulnerability that took many services offline, noting Barracuda’s unified threat intelligence automatically rolled out protection with zero configuration required.
Mr McLean also advised leaders to simplify their technology stacks during modernisation to lower costs and reduce configuration errors, rather than relying on fragmented tools acquired over time.
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