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Africa: Eight Companies Adopt IBM’s Cloud to Fuel Innovation

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(L-r): Tejas Mehta, general manager, IBM Central and West Africa; Dr. Vincent Olatunji, acting DG, NITDA: Dipo Faulkner, country general manager, IBM Nigeria; Otunba Bimbola Ashiru, commissioner of Commerce & Industry at the IBM Business Connect 2016 Conference in Lagos.
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IBM announced during its signature event in Lagos, ‘IBM Business Nigeria 2016’ that eight companies across Africa, spanning some of the fastest growing industries in the region, from telecommunications to retail, have chosen IBM to provide IT solutions delivered as a service via IBM Cloud. This will help the firms drive productivity, innovation, differentiation and competitiveness in their respective industries.

Located in various urban centers across the west, north, central and southern African regional economic zones, all businesses seek to use IBM public and hybrid cloud solutions to accelerate business development and innovation and create global growth strategies.

Companies including Navigation and Geocoding Technologies Ltd. (Naveo), Whogohost, Korrect Software, Serve Consulting, and IntTeck Global Systems, are all looking to the hybrid cloud for greater flexibility, scalability and central management. This will enable them to move workloads to where they make the most sense for their business.

These companies are not alone and their move to the hybrid cloud is indicative of a global trend. According to IDC, hybrid cloud is the new norm for businesses, and it predicts that more than 80 percent of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud architectures by 2017.

A 2016 global study of hybrid cloud, Growing up Hybrid: Accelerating Digital Transformation from the IBM Center for Applied Insights, found that 500 hybrid cloud implementers from 13 countries and 23 industries are using hybrid cloud to jumpstart “next-generation” initiatives.

“The IBM Cloud allows a company to improve business agility and capacity to quickly meet shifting customer demands,” said Tejas Mehta, general manager, IBM Central and West Africa.” He added,

“The Africa region is propelling innovation by adopting IBM Cloud. The IBM Cloud will give them the technical muscle to consistently align their operational objectives and assets with prevailing market conditions, laying a foundation for commercial sustenance and future growth.”

African companies adopting IBM hybrid cloud solutions:
Naveo: Located in Moka, on the island nation of Mauritius, Naveo specializes in fleet management solutions, providing tracking tools designed to help customers dispatch vehicles more effectively, improve worker performance and reduce operating costs.

Looking for the right skills to manage the IT environment needed to host its fleet-tracking and asset-tracking GPS solutions, improve operational performance and eliminate system downtime, the company migrated from its existing hosting platform to IBM’s hybrid cloud solution based on an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model.

As a result of the migration to the highly-scalable IBM Cloud, the company was able to develop and launch Naveo One, an all-in-one fleet management solution offering telematics, telemetry and geographic information system (GIS) capabilities. Naveo can now focus on marketing its GPS tracking application with assurance that the infrastructure will support its growth across the nations of the Indian Ocean Islands and Africa.

An Angolan distribution company markets and distributes food and non-food products in its domestic market via a network of hypermarkets, supermarkets and convenience stores.

The company managed its human resources (HR) operations manually, which was slow, time-consuming, labor-intensive and expensive.

The company wanted to automate all HR processes, including tracking attendance and absences, to gain better visibility into HR management.

By implementing IBM Business Process Manager Standard software, the company successfully automated its manual business procedures, improving efficiency and saving time. Time spent managing business processes have been reduced by 50 percent, freeing up more time for functional and strategic tasks for all operational and executive personnel.

Whogohost: A web services and hosting solutions provider in Nigeria, Whogohost has become one of the country’s leading hosting providers.

After suffering from hosting downtime that threatened the growing success of its business, Whogohost turned to IBM Cloud to deliver a robust, reliable and high performance cloud infrastructure that customers demand.

This has resulted in a high-quality service experience for its fast- expanding clientele. The company is now well known for consistently increasing up-time, as well as effectively and flexibly meeting customer demands.

An IT company in North Africa which specializes in domain registration, web development and web design and hosting services, has recorded consistent growth of its customer base, significantly improved business performance and service delivery levels since it adopted an IBM hybrid cloud infrastructure.

This allowed the company’s enterprise customers to migrate from traditional dedicated servers to the cloud.

The aim was to help these businesses maintain high performance for their cloud solutions while providing significant improvements in flexibility and redundancy and the ability to scale easily as they developed.

Korrect Software: Korrect is a Mauritius provider of royalty processing, metadata management and sales analysis for record labels and companies in the music and entertainment industry. When the company needed a robust cloud-based delivery platform that would support increasing volumes of data and allow users to generate reports on entitled music royalties, it turned to IBM Cloud.

With the implementation of a bare-metal server infrastructure, provisioned by IBM Cloud, to support its music royalty application, Korrect gained the ability to efficiently process tremendous amounts of data without bandwidth limitations. IBM’s cloud-based solution allows application users to get timely reports on their entitled royalties.

A Ghanaian media company improved operating efficiency, boosted its revenue streams and reduced customer churn and its total cost of ownership when it selected IBM Cloud.

The company implemented a new billing and subscriber management system called FDTV which is based on the scalable IBM WebSphere software and an IBM data server.

Available in five regional areas surrounding Accra, Kumasi, Takoradi, Cape Coast and Elmina, FDTV provides a variety of television and radio stations through a monthly subscription. The broadcaster now anticipates that it will easily accommodate the growth of its subscriber base for years to come.

Serve Consulting: Since migrating its infrastructure to the IBM Cloud, Nigeria-based IT solutions provider, Serve, is able to offer customers higher-quality service levels. In addition, the company has achieved an effective operating expenditure model that is much easier to use and manage.

The company is now looking forward to expanding beyond its existing markets as a result of IBM’s global footprint.

IntTeck Global Systems: a local developer and vendor for Global Insurance Business Solution, a core insurance application from Lagos, Nigeria, needed to consistently deliver innovative software products and enhance the efficiency of its service delivery value chain.

Since adopting IBM’s Cloud infrastructure, the company has experienced increased customer satisfaction levels, easier configuration and deployment of virtual machines, reduced operational costs and improved regulatory compliance within its industry.

In January 2016, IBM was ranked #1 in Hybrid and positioned as a leader in Hybrid Cloud Management Solutions (Synergy Group Research and Forrester, respectively).

 

 


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Study Reveals 88.5% of Phishing Attacks Focus on Stealing Account Credentials

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Kaspersky analysed phishing and scam campaigns observed from January through September 2025 and found that 88.5% of attacks globally sought credentials for various online accounts.

Another 9.5% targeted personal data such as names, addresses, and dates of birth, while 2% focused on bank card details.

According to data from Kaspersky, over 38 million phishing links were clicked in Africa in the previous year (from November 2024 to October 2025) – all of which were detected and blocked by Kaspersky solutions.

Not everyone uses protective solutions on their devices however, and phishing remains one of the most prevalent cyber threats, with attackers luring users to fake websites where they unwittingly surrender their login credentials, personal information, or bank card details.

Kaspersky research shows that most phishing pages transmit stolen information via email, Telegram bots, or attacker-controlled panels, before it enters underground resale channels.

Data stolen through phishing is rarely used only once: credentials from multiple campaigns are consolidated into data dumps and sold on dark web markets, in some cases for as little as $50. Buyers sort and verify the data to check whether accounts remain active and reusable across different services.

According to Kaspersky Digital Footprint Intelligence, average 2025 prices ranged from $0.90 for global Internet portals to $105 for crypto platforms and $350 for online banking access. Personal documents such as passports or ID cards sold for about $15 on average, with pricing influenced by account age, balance, linked payment methods, and security settings.

As datasets are enriched and combined, attackers can build detailed digital profiles that may later support targeted attacks on executives, finance staff, IT-administrators or individuals with valuable assets or personal documents.

“Our analysis shows that credentials account for nearly 90% of phishing attempts. Once collected, logins, passwords, phone numbers, and personal details are aggregated, checked, and resold, sometimes years after the initial theft.

Combined with new information, even old credentials can enable account takeovers and targeted attacks against both individuals and organisations.

By leveraging open-source intelligence and old breach data, attackers can craft highly personalised scams, turning one-time victims into long-term targets for identity theft, blackmail, or financial fraud,” said Olga Altukhova, senior web content analyst at Kaspersky.


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Study Reveals Majority of IT Professionals Show Openness to Cyber Immunity

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The cybersecurity landscape is evolving rapidly, with organisations seeking more robust ways to protect their digital assets. A recent global study conducted by Kaspersky reveals a growing shift toward proactive security strategies, particularly the adoption of Secure by Design development and Cyber Immunity – an innovative approach that embeds resilience directly into system architecture.

The study highlights that 90% of cybersecurity professionals surveyed in the Middle East, Turkiye and Africa (META) region are familiar with Secure by Design development. This methodology integrates security into the very fabric of a system from its inception, rather than treating it as an afterthought.

Such an approach is already employed in high-stakes industries like aerospace, where security cannot be bolted on later – it must be intrinsic. Despite its advantages, however, adoption has been slow due to challenges related to standardisation and cost.

Cyber Immunity is the next frontier in cybersecurity

Building on Secure by Design principles, Cyber Immunity takes cybersecurity a step further by creating systems that inherently resist attacks without the need for constant patching or additional security layers. The study reveals that most experts are familiar with Cyber Immunity but interpret it differently.

When asked what they associate with the term, 64% of respondents in the META region linked it to Secure by Design systems that remain resilient under attack, while 56% viewed it as a combination of technology and policy measures that block cybercriminal access. Another 48% connected it to highly skilled cybersecurity teams, indicating that while awareness is high, a unified understanding is still developing.

The growing demand for proactive security

One of the most striking findings is the optimism surrounding inherently secure systems. Over half of respondents in the META region (63%) believe it is already possible or definitely achievable to design systems capable of withstanding cyberattacks without relying on additional security solutions.

Another 32% think it might be possible, reflecting openness to this idea despite some uncertainty. This shift in mindset aligns with a broader industry trend: traditional reactive security measures are no longer sufficient.

With AI-powered threats and increasingly sophisticated attacks, organisations need solutions that do more than just detect breaches—they must prevent them by design.

Integrating Cyber Immunity into security strategies

The study emphasises that resilience, expertise, and flexibility will define the next generation of cybersecurity. While Secure by Design provides the methodology, Cyber Immunity represents the ultimate goal—systems so robust that they minimise reliance on external defences.

“For companies looking ahead, Cyber Immunity offers more than just protection — it brings clear business benefits. When systems are built to be secure from the ground up, there’s less need for constant updates, patches, and extra security tools. That means fewer costs, less strain on IT teams, and stronger, more reliable protection over time,” said Dmitry Lukiyan, Head of KasperskyOS Business Unit.

Most importantly in today’s threat landscape, Cyber Immunity offers robust protection against next-generation challenges — including AI-driven attacks capable of outmaneuvering traditional security measures.

When security becomes an intrinsic property of system architecture rather than an external addition, businesses gain more than just protection—they secure a competitive market advantage.

This proactive approach future-proofs critical infrastructure, enabling organisations to operate confidently even as threats evolve. It transforms cybersecurity from a defensive necessity into a strategic differentiator that accelerates digital transformation while mitigating risk.

As the cybersecurity environment becomes more complex, Cyber Immunity is emerging as a vital strategy. Organisations that adopt it now will not only enhance their protection but also position themselves ahead of the curve in an increasingly volatile digital world.

 


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Konga launches Jara sales with 25% discount on Starlink kits, free delivery

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Konga, Nigeria’s leading composite e-commerce platform, has launched its inaugural 2026 shopping campaign, Konga Jara, offering 25 per cent discount on Starlink internet kits alongside free nationwide delivery.

Konga launches Jara sales with 25% discount on Starlink kits, free delivery

Konga

The campaign, drawing from the Nigerian concept of “jara” — the extra value traders add to purchases — aims to deliver exceptional deals across categories, helping shoppers turn new year aspirations into reality through affordable technology and value-driven shopping.

To qualify for the Starlink discount, customers must purchase kits on Konga.com, activate them at starlink.com/activate, and email activation details to [email protected] for verification against Starlink’s records. Discounts are subject to terms and conditions.

Konga said spotlighting Starlink underscores reliable internet’s role in Nigeria’s digital economy, supporting work, learning, entrepreneurship and communication for households and businesses.

Mr Onochie Melvin, Head of Commercial Planning at Konga, said: “We listened carefully to what Nigerians said they needed to truly kickstart 2026 on the right footing. Reliable internet connectivity emerged as the foundation upon which other aspirations depend.”

He added: “Students need it for online learning, entrepreneurs need it to scale digital businesses, and professionals rely on it for remote work. This Starlink offer is not just about selling products; it is about removing barriers that prevent Nigerians from fully participating in the digital economy.”

Beyond connectivity, Konga Jara provides genuine products from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) with transparent pricing, warranties and authenticity guarantees.

As a composite e-commerce ecosystem, Konga integrates shopping, payments and logistics for seamless nationwide access, with exclusive deals shared via its social media channels throughout the campaign.

Shoppers can explore offers at www.konga.com and follow Konga’s official pages for updates across the Konga Group.


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