PULL QUOTE: “Every month, HP Solutions remediates over 11 million IT issues, keeping employees productive and IT teams focused on strategic initiatives and their core business.”
Imagine waking up to find your customer data leaked, operations frozen, and your inbox flooded with ransom demands. For an increasing number of businesses, this is no longer a hypothetical.
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 not to mention the financial impact for the company.
As organisations reel to manage response, the overall cost moves past the already expensive containment of the breach or covering for service disruptions – sometimes into millions of Naira. Even when overall operations are only marginally affected, indirect issues can occur that require funding, including legal fees, public relations advisory, overtime for IT teams, and upgrading security systems.
But these situations are only happening to the country’s largest corporations, right? Why should my mid-size business small enterprise be concerned?
These questions were recently addressed by antivirus experts, Kaspersky, which in May released its State of Ransomware Report. According to the research, 17.5 percent of Nigerian users surveyed had been affected by web-based threats, with Nigeria placing in the top five countries in the Middle East and Africa region experiencing a sharp rise in cyberthreats in 2025.
“As countries like Nigeria expands their digital economies, ransomware attacks are on the rise, particularly in the manufacturing, financial and government sectors. Limited cybersecurity awareness and resources leave many organizations vulnerable, and the region remains behind global hotspots,” Kaspersky said in a recent press release around the report. The report also notes that cybercriminals tend to think that African countries are easier prey because they are more vulnerable.
It is not a question of size. 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. Deloitte’s recent 2025 Cybersecurity landscape analysis in Nigeria has posited that no sector is immune to the threat, highlighting an urgent need for proactive security measures.
It is for this reason that more organisations are relying on smart, predictive IT that can help lower operational risk through the built-in tools in their new and existing infrastructure to meet their needs.
More and more IT institutions are finding ways to embed AI solutions into their offerings, helping to improve processing times, optimise resource allocation, and reduce overall latency. But from a security perspective, AI is revolutionising digital security by embedding intelligent threat detection and response mechanisms directly to their devices. As more cyberterrorists use AI to manipulate their targets, IT companies are using the same technology to combat these new threats.
HP is 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 is now integrated across our product ranges means that our product lines exhibit robust encryption and secure boot processes, protecting against malwares, ransomwares, and other advanced threats.
This forward-thinking approach to help build more user-friendly (and cost-effective) AI solutions has been at the core of the HP Workplace Experience (WXP) platform, helping to give IT teams greater knowledge and assistance so they can prioritise more strategic protection of assets and data.
WXP is an enterprise-level tool that uses AI and analytics to monitor devices, anticipate tech issues, and optimise employee support, designed to address technology issues proactively by providing IT with powerful insights, through a unified dashboard system.
Through AI-powered sentiment analysis, the tool can analyse and determine recurring themes for IT to prioritise. Meanwhile, the Fleet Explorer tool lets users request query fleet data and receive instantaneous responses. For example, high memory utilisation 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?” and remediate the problem based on the results.
Every month, HP Solutions remediate over 11 million IT issues, keeping employees productive and IT teams focused on strategic initiatives and their core business.
With the right tools, Nigerian enterprises can lead in the fight against cybercriminals.
Yesh Surjoodeen is the Managing Director of HP in Southern Africa
