Airtel Africa through its B2B provider Airtel Business, has partnered with Cisco to provide secure internet access to SMEs in Africa. This is in support of their digital transformation journeys.
The partnership will combine Airtel Africa’s fixed connectivity solutions with Cisco Umbrella, a cloud-based, plug and play security solution. This will secure businesses’ online transaction channels. Initially, the solution will be available in Kenya, Uganda, Congo-Brazzaville, and Madagascar before rolling out to the rest of Airtel Africa’s markets.
As SMEs across Africa continue to adopt digital platforms, they face a fast-evolving array of digital threats. These range from surveillance to infrastructure disruption and delays due to cyber attacks and malware.
The Cisco Umbrella unified security service reduces the complexity of monitoring and managing threats and alerts. Umbrella ensures fewer infections, which in turn means less remediation time and less downtime which in turn leads to cost savings. It further converges DNS Layer Security, Secure Web Gateway, Cloud Delivered Firewall (CDFW), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) and Interactive Threat Intel. This is powered by Talos, the largest privately owned threat intelligence agency globally.
All these services can be consumed via the cloud, providing a Secure Access Secure Edge (SASE) architecture which can also seamlessly secure SDWAN deployments.
Commenting on the partnership with Cisco, Luc Serviant, Group Enterprise Director of Airtel Business at Airtel Africa noted, “Internet penetration is rising across Africa and systems are even more connected as the digital transformation is driving growth amongst organizations. Through our partnership with Cisco, we support SMEs and entrepreneurs across Africa with their end-to-end digital presence and a secure, reliable internet to protect them from foreign attacks.”