Safaricom have announced that they will soon be launching cybersecurity products and diversify their offerings as a telecom provider. With this move, the telecom company aims to help Kenyan enterprises mitigate the loss of sensitive business data.
According to the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA), cyber threats in Kenya grew by 11.76% and stood at 3.8 million, back in September 2018-2019. As a result, CA said that they had to deploy additional sensors and increased resources to conduct cyber threat analysis.
Understanding this need to prevent cyber attacks, Safaricom decided to enter the cybersecurity sector and protect Kenyan enterprises from anomalies. They say that this step will allow them to expand their product suite and identify, manage and eradicate threats if any.
Bob Collymore, CEO at Safaricom stated that the products are already gathering interest from financial and transport sectors. He claims that one of the reasons is that the solution is custom made for organizations from various industries.
Industry experts expect Kenyan telecom players to follow suit, given the rise in cyber attacks. We believe that this move will spur the competition among telco players in Africa after Cloudflare consolidated their data center presence in Lagos, Nigeria.