13-03-2025
GITEX 2025: Cybersecurity in Africa's Growth, Challenges, and Prospects
GITEX Africa 2025 is coming back to Marrakech this year with groundbreaking themes, set to be a platform for fresh ideas to enhance the continent's economy and strengthen its tech transition.
The event will be an opportunity to engage in discussions that touch upon Africa's current technological shift, as well as for visitors to meet with experts in the field to learn about up-and-coming innovations in the tech world.
A key highlight to look out for this year is GITEX Africa's landmark cybersecurity conference, the Cybersecurity Forum, poised to bring together international experts to discuss digital security challenges.
The event will unite technology professionals from over 100 countries to explore cutting-edge strategies, share breakthrough technologies, and develop collaborative approaches to protecting global digital infrastructure.
Africa's digital transformation, cybersecurity challenges, and growing market
Africa is standing at a pivotal juncture as the world is undergoing an unprecedented era with digital transformation accelerating across the globe.
The continent has swiftly shifted into adopting the digital revolution, unlocking immense economic potential for companies and individuals.
However, the adoption of digital technologies has exposed Africa's vulnerabilities to cyber threats. This situation primarily drives the African cybersecurity market, as the continent has to counter the growing number of cyberattacks.
This demand for cybersecurity solutions in the region necessitates more investments to enhance the response to cyber threats.
Cybersecurity is mainly about restraining unauthorized access to computers, networks, programs, and data. Big volumes of confidential information are now being shared, and stored by organizations, governments, and individuals leading to the growing significance of cybersecurity in countering data breaches.
As Africa's cybersecurity market is projected to reach $2.29 billion by 2025, the need for robust cybersecurity measures has never been more critical.
To address these challenges and opportunities, the Gitex 2025 Cybersecurity Forum, scheduled for April 14-15, 2025, will convene Africa's most influential leaders to forge alliances, combat threats, and pioneer original solutions.
Cyber resilience: A critical priority for Africa
As cyber threats become more sophisticated, building resilience is of paramount importance to protect people, companies, and governments' confidentiality.
Resilience is one of the crucial components of cybersecurity and refers to an organization's ability to anticipate, withstand, and recover from cyber incidents.
When a company, organization, or government sets its resilient cyber defense, it establishes a system that will help ensure the smooth continuity of business operations during and after cyber incidents, thus minimizing disruptions.
Resilience is also key to an accelerated recovery from attacks and improves risk management through accurate identification and mitigation of potential threats proactively.
Establishing resilient cybersecurity leads to increased trust, and maintaining customer and stakeholders' confidence, while complying with industry regulations and standards for data protection.
However, cyber resilience remains weak in Africa. The World Economic Forum's Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025 report revealed that 36% of respondents are not confident that the countries in Africa, where their organization is based, are not well equipped to respond to cyber threats.
The African continent needs more work on its resilience to counter cyber threats to establish a good foot for companies and enhance its data protection systems.
In this context, the GITEX forum will be timely, providing discussions on developing comprehensive resilience frameworks that integrate technological innovations, security awareness, and cost-effective solutions to mitigate emerging threats.
Safeguarding Data in the Cloud Era
The shift to cloud computing – the delivery of hosted services, including software, hardware, and storage, over the internet – is generating benefits of rapid deployment, flexibility, low up-front costs, and scalability.
Cloud computing has thus become virtually universal among organizations of all sizes, often as part of a hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure.
Although this shift has revolutionized business operations, offering scalability and efficiency, it however introduced new security challenges.
Of course, when speaking about data a key concern arises: security.
To ensure data security and confidentiality, cloud security is the design of technologies, policies, controls, and services that protect cloud data, applications, and infrastructure from cyber threats.
The forum is set to explore strategies for optimizing cloud costs without compromising security, ensuring that organizations can harness the full potential of cloud technologies securely.
Capacity Building: Empowering the Cybersecurity Workforce
A skilled workforce is the backbone of effective cybersecurity, and the GITEX forum is set to address this pressing need as well as covering the importance of capacity building. The forum will even feature 'hackmasters,' a collaborative international effort to strengthen global cybersecurity resilience. On April 16, this event 'fosters cross-border partnerships, tests response capabilities, and promotes innovative techniques to safeguard critical infrastructure.'
Cybersecurity is vital for Africa. By investing in human capital, Africa can enhance its cyber defense capabilities and reduce the skills gap in the cybersecurity sector.
GITEX Africa 2025's forum on cybersecurity is set to become a platform to address data protection strategies, elevate the importance of compliance with regulations and the implementation of robust data security measures to protect against breaches and unauthorized access across the continent.
