US cybersecurity giant invests big in South Africa

Palo Alto Networks, the world’s largest pureplay cybersecurity company, said it is betting big on South Africa. The US company sees growth rates “way above” what it achieves at a global level, according to Helmut Reisinger, its CEO for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The Nasdaq-listed company, which has a market capitalisation of US$122-billion, has been operating in South Africa for the past two years. In that time, the local team has built capabilities targeting government and critical infrastructure, among other verticals.

“Africa is at the crossroads between the West and the East. You’re very exposed as a society, as a country, as critical infrastructure, as companies, to what is happening in geopolitics,” Reisinger said at a media event held in Johannesburg late last week. “We invest, particularly because we see strong dynamics on the African continent.”

According to Justin Lee, the company’s MD for Southern Africa, Palo Alto Networks has invested in local cloud capacity to align its offering with growing demand from both the public and private sectors for security solutions that enforce data sovereignty.

Lee did not detail how much was spent on local cloud capacity or the amount that has been secured. He did, however, mention that Palo Alto Networks has partnered with Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services – as it does in other markets – to ensure its cloud computing capacity is “elastic”, allowing it to scale to higher levels of demand as needed.

Demand for Palo Alto Networks’ services in South Africa is driven by its “platformisation” strategy, which aims to reduce fragmentation and “tool sprawl” in the cybersecurity environment.

‘More with less’

“Companies have become smarter in South Africa; they are looking for more consolidation of tools from OEMs and vendors. We’ve had to downscale our tools and learn to do more with less,” said Lee.

“That platform strategy is to bring down the noise in the cybersecurity environment and also bring down the cost – especially in the African context – because cost is critical. We are earning, for example, in rands but spending in US dollars, so that becomes a big factor.”

The shift towards this “platformisation” is one Palo Alto Networks is seeing among its clients globally and is driven by a change in perspective from the predominant “best of breed” philosophy that has driven purchasing decisions in the cybersecurity industry for years.

Read: Africa bears the brunt of global ransomware attacks

Speaking to TechCentral in an interview at the event, Reisinger said having disparate solutions from multiple vendors is itself a security risk, as the gaps between these applications are open to attack. This architecture also leads to wastage, as compute and storage resources are usually provisioned for each solution, leading to higher costs and multiple sources of information that do not necessarily “talk to each other” in any meaningful way.

When attacks do occur, cybersecurity personnel spend more time trying to consolidate data across platforms to figure out what is going on instead of applying a solution to the problem.

“Going from an environment where you may have seven or more tools to one helps improve staff productivity. One of our CIO clients said, ‘When I go to my teams, my people are smiling again.’ This is because cybersecurity is a stressful job and removing the complexity helps teams remove the grunt work that leads to burnout,” said Reisinger.

Another driver of the shift to a platform strategy is the rise in the use of automated tools by threat actors, which have increased the number of zero-day attacks globally substantially. The time between compromise and data exfiltration has also collapsed dramatically. Three years ago, the average was nine days. Now it’s down to one day, with the fastest incidents clocked at just 72 minutes.

Read: Absa pours billions into tech, boosting cybersecurity and automation drive

The platform strategy comes with a strong public sector focus, where Palo Alto Networks has adopted a consultative approach to stress the need for a holistic rather than fragmented approach to cybersecurity as government gears up for a digital overhaul of public services.

“It’s not just a case of one department that we’re going after. We’re looking at a government framework. We’ve designed our go-to-market specifically for national government and critical infrastructure,” said Lee.  – © 2026 NewsCentral Media

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