According to the African Union’s 2021 Africa Cyberthreat Assessment Report, cybercrime costs Africa over $4 billion annually, indicating that the stakes have never been higher for businesses. In this rapidly shifting threat landscape and realities, esentry, a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP), is revolutionising how the continent approaches digital protection — with precision, speed, and local intelligence at its core.
What sets esentry apart isn’t just its technology but the company’s business philosophy. esentry believes cybersecurity in Africa must be forged on home-grown solutions from the players whose teeth are in the game and who understand the pain points from the context of the continent’s unique, challenging business dynamics. Indeed, esentry engineers its services around the realities of African infrastructure, behaviours, and threat patterns. This grounded approach allows esentry to anticipate attacks before they strike and build trust where it matters most.
As digital trade and cross-border commerce continue accelerating across Africa, the need for trust, stability, and uninterrupted operations has never been more critical. Companies like esentry are enabling the infrastructure for modern African businesses to thrive rather than just responding to threats. Sectors like fintech, powering real-time transactions, health tech platforms handling sensitive data, and e-commerce sites scaling across regions all operate in high-risk digital environments where cybersecurity resilience is now directly tied to trade resilience.
In its Q1 2025 Cybersecurity Threat Report, esentry highlighted over 33,000 cyber incidents across Africa, revealing a surge in advanced attack methods, from ransomware deployments using encoded payloads to compromised user accounts being traded on dark web marketplaces. The report also found that newly discovered vulnerabilities are typically exploited within 48 to 72 hours, a timeline that leaves little room for traditional, reactive defences. These insights form the backbone of esentry’s architecture-first, threat-led approach that prioritises speed, automation, and local threat intelligence to keep clients one step ahead.
The Q1 2025 Cybersecurity Threat Report by esentry also spotlighted the growing pressure on financial institutions to align with global regulatory frameworks, not just as a compliance checkbox but as a business imperative.
A case study of such integrated intervention is about an institution navigating the high-stakes path to PCI DSS certification, which requires full-spectrum visibility across its infrastructure. The challenge wasn’t just technical. It was operational. The ability to detect, aggregate, and interpret security events in real-time would determine the outcome of an imminent audit and the credibility of the institution’s security posture going forward. esentry’s approach was surgical and time bound. Within two weeks, the team deployed an integrated solution combining Endpoint Detection and response (EDR) and a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platform. This gave the institution real-time threat intelligence, centralised log management, and actionable insights across its environment.
The result? A successful audit and, more notably, a projected 75% reduction in compliance-related incidents, an outcome that speaks to the esentry’s ability to translate compliance bottlenecks into cybersecurity resilience very quickly.
Africa does not just need cybersecurity providers; it needs cybersecurity partners who understand the structure, the stakes, and the speed of its digital evolution. With economies increasingly reliant on digital finance, remote infrastructure, and interconnected platforms, the cost of downtime, data loss, or reputational damage can stall progress at scale.
What makes esentry revolutionary is the context-first mindset the company is building for Africa, in Africa. They tackle emerging threats from USSD session hijacking to decoding region-specific attack vectors. With this strategy, the gap between exposure and resilience is increasing, and in doing so, a new standard for what cybersecurity should look like on the continent is set.
The future of Africa’s digital economy will depend on how well it secures what it builds. As internet penetration deepens, cloud adoption accelerates, and sectors like fintech, health tech, and e-commerce scale across borders, the risks will multiply.
But will there be opportunities for innovation? Africa’s cybersecurity future will not be built by chance—it will be architected by visionaries, innovators, and frontline defenders like esentry. As the continent accelerates its digital transformation, the focus should not just be on infrastructure but on indigenous intelligence, forward-thinking policies and strategic collaboration. esentry is poised to respond beyond threats to redefine how resilience is built. For CIOs, CTOs, and enterprise leaders, the question is no longer about whether to act but who to partner with. Africa’s cyber future is here. esentry is already securing it.
