Imagine you waking up to discover that your operations have been frozen, your mailbox is overflowing with ransom demands, and your customer data has been compromised. This is no longer just a hypothetical situation for a growing number of South African companies.
A single data breach can be a harrowing experience for a business, often leading to operational disruption, a loss of trust from customers and partners, and financial loss that can ba fatal to an entire enterprise.
As organisations struggle to manage response, the overall cost exceeds the already expensive control of the breach or covering for service disruptions. Even when overall operations are only marginally affected, additional indirect issues can occur – such as what happened during one 2025 incident where one of the country’s largest manufacturers was unable to process invoices timeously. Legal payments, public relations advice, IT staff overtime, and security system upgrades in later months are examples of additional expenses.
In the 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, analysts estimated the average cost of recovering from a data breach incident in South Africa was R53 million. This is a significant expense that increased by around R4 million from the year before.
But these situations are only happening to the country’s largest corporations, right? Why should your mid-size business or SME (small and medium enterprise) be concerned?
These questions were recently answered by antivirus experts, ESET, which in March released its bi-annual Threat Report. According to this research, 40% of ransomware attacks, and just under 35% of infostealer incidents on the continent occurred in South Africa. That’s across 54 different countries – with cybercriminals assuming South Africa lacks the cybersecurity Knowledge and infrastructure necessary to defend itself.
Businesses of all sizes are being targeted, and while many are seemingly aware of the rising threat, many aren’t able to allocate the cybersecurity budgets to match. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ most recent data, reducing cyber risks is a top priority for South African business executives; nevertheless, just 29% of the companies polled said they planned to raise their cyber budget by 6–10% by 2025.
It is for this reason that more organisations are relying on smart, predictive IT that can help lower operational risk through the integrated solutions in their new and existing infrastructure to meet their needs.
In order to enhance processing speeds, optimize resource allocation, and lower overall latency, an increasing number of IT organizations are figuring out how to include AI solutions into their products. However, by directly integrating intelligent threat detection and response mechanisms into their devices, AI is transforming digital security IT firms are utilizing AI to counter these emerging dangers as more cyberterrorists utilize it to influence their targets.
Through HP’s own research, we have been able to use AI algorithms to continuously monitor system activity and network traffic across devices, identifying anomalies and suspicious patterns that may indicate a cyber threat. This proactive approach allows for immediate mitigation actions, reducing the risk of data breaches. Meanwhile, our AI systems are able to learn from user behaviour and historical threat data to dynamically adjust security settings. For example, if the system detects multiple failed login attempts, it can automatically tighten access controls. The fact that HP Wolf Security suite is now integrated across our product ranges means that our product lines exhibit robust encryption and secure boot processes, protecting against malware, ransomware, and other advanced threats.
The HP Workplace Experience (WXP) platform has been built on a forward-thinking approach to help create more affordable and user-friendly AI solutions. This approach helps IT teams prioritize more strategic data and asset security by providing them with more information and support.
WXP is an enterprise-level platform that uses AI and analytics to monitor devices, predict tech issues, and optimise employee support. It isdesigned to address technology issues proactively by providing IT with powerful insights. It draws on billions of data points to intelligently anticipate problems, removing friction for employees and reducing the seemingly never-ending IT requests through a unified dashboard system.
Through AI-powered sentiment analysis, the technology can analyse and determine recurring themes for IT to prioritise. For example, high memory usage often leads to poor PC performance. So, an IT manager could start by asking, “which devices experienced the most memory over-utilization in the past 30 days?” Then, based on the results, fix it before it becomes an issue for employees.
Every month, HP’s software and services remediate over 11 million IT issues, keeping employees productive and IT teams focused on important tasks – like finding newer, cost-effective data-protection systems and initiatives.
With the right tools, South African businesses can lead in the fight against cybercriminals, preventing financial losses and sending a clear message: “we’re not easy targets”.
Opinion piece by Yesh Surjoodeen, Southern Africa Managing Director at HP
