Businesses Tasked on Resilience as AI Expands Cyber Threat Landscape

Businesses in Nigeria and across the wider West African region have been strongly urged to urgently reinforce their cyber resilience frameworks, as the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and decentralized digital services rapidly widens corporate exposure to highly sophisticated cyber threats.

The warning was delivered by technology and cybersecurity experts at the maiden West Africa edition of the SHIFT Conference hosted in Lagos by Commvault, an international cyber resilience firm. Speaking under the conference theme, "The Cyber Resilience World Is Shifting Indeed," industry stakeholders noted that organizations can no longer rely solely on legacy, traditional disaster recovery systems to survive modern network breaches.

The Scale of the Threat

Citing latest data from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Rasheed Ola Jimoh, Senior Director for Sub-Saharan Africa at Commvault, revealed the sheer volume of malicious activity targeting local digital infrastructure:

“Nigeria records approximately 3,500 cyber-attacks every week," Ola Jimoh stated. "A significant portion of these carry a ransomware element, malicious software that locks an organisation's data and demands payment before restoring access. Every organisation is going to face some form of attack, one way or the other. The question is whether they are ready to bounce back.”

The Shift from Disaster Recovery to Cyber Recovery

Corporate Vice President and General Manager for Commvault's Emerging Markets, Fady Richmany, warned that many businesses remain critically unprepared for the scale and technical sophistication of modern, automated attacks. He emphasized that the growing enterprise deployment of agentic AI systems is creating millions of "non-human identities" that act as highly vulnerable, unsecured entry points for threat actors.

Richmany explained that when a modern multi-cloud network is breached and data is encrypted, standard disaster recovery playbooks often fail entirely. Instead, enterprises must transition to an integrated cyber recovery strategy. Global industry data highlights that it takes organizations an average of 24 days to recover fully from a major cyber incident, prolonged downtime that routinely causes severe reputational damage and catastrophic financial losses.

To mitigate this, experts recommended that African enterprises invest in advanced resilience solutions, including:

• Isolated Data Vaulting: Maintaining entirely separate, immutable copies of critical organizational data out of reach from primary network threats.
• Cleanroom Testing: Deploying isolated, highly controlled virtual environments to routinely rehearse and validate recovery protocols before an actual crisis hits.
• Integrated Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Protection: Unifying security parameters across all cloud platforms, data repositories, human users, and automated AI agents.

Ravi Baldev Singh, Senior Director of the Sales Engineering Division at Commvault, added that as critical sectors like banking, fintech, retail, and public administration become completely dependent on digital payment and mobile banking structures, robust cyber resilience is no longer an optional IT upgrade, but a fundamental commercial necessity.