Kenya enterprises are being urged to invest in early warning systems to guard their systems against wanton cyber attacks which have been on the rise.

According to cyber security firm Commvault, many firms who have migrated their services to cloud infrastructure continue to face challenges such as recovery of their data upon attacks a move which has lead companies to incur additional losses.

“We are here to protect our customers and to tell them be aware and be prepared because if you are not prepared for that day, the financial losses, reputation losses and impact is massive and coming online takes amount of time if you are not well prepared,” said Fady Richmany, Commvault Regional Vice President Emerging Markets in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

According to estimates by the Communications Authority (CA) Kenyan firms are estimated to have lost Ksh 11 billion in 2023 alone.

As companies move most of their services online, Richmany said attacks will continue a factor which will force companies to invest in ensuring they operate resilient systems which rely in artificial intelligence for early warnings and detection of looming threats.

“We have seen a lot of customers in the region who take 2-3 months to come back online which is a lot. Imagine you are an airline and you get attacked and it takes you two months to come back online and to fly passengers. Who is going to fly with you?” he added.

Through the shift campaign the firm is running, Commvault is targeting to make its customers in Kenya more resilient through its unified, cloud-native resilience and Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) which helps in speedy recovery of data.

“The gap we see across the board is really lack of awareness especially in the case of a customers already boarded to the cloud without even knowing. The lack of awareness goes into multiple directions but the most important direction is in a lot of cases we have the shadow ID. Assumption is that if I’m in on the cloud the hyperscale will protect the data,” noted Richmany.

Latest data by CA indicates that the number of cyber threats detected in the third quarter of the year to March 2025, rose by 201.7pc to 2.5 billion from 840.9 million threats reported last quarter.

A total of 13.2 million advisories were issued in response to the cyber threats detected, representing a 14.2pc increase compared to 11.6 million advisories issued last quarter.