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Cloud Investments in EMEA Hit 27%, $1.1Bn Revenue in 4Q14

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IT infrastructure spending including server, disk storage, and ethernet switch) for public and private cloud in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) grew by 27% to reach $1.1 billion in revenue in 4Q14 and totaled around $4.1 billion for the whole year, with 28% growth over 2013.

The cloud-related of total EMEA infrastructure expenditure on server, disk storage, and Ethernet switch, according to the newly introduced EMEA data portion of the International Data Corporation (IDC) WW Quarterly Cloud Infrastructure Tracker, grew by 3 share percentage points to exceed 17% in 2014.

In terms of storage capacity, cloud represented around 32% of total EMEA capacity in 4Q14, with 52% growth over the same period a year before.

For the scope of this tracker, IDC has tracked the following vendors: Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Lenovo, NetApp, the major ODM vendors, and others.

IDC expects this market to reach a value of $10.8 billion by 2019, or 39% of the total market expenditure, representing one of the areas of tremendous growth for the European infrastructure sector, compared to the expectation of a stagnant, if not declining, traditional market.

Western Europe

Western Europe accounted for about 82% of the EMEA cloud business in 2014 and saw its cloud investment soar from 15% of the datacenter infrastructure spending in 2013 to 19% in 2014 and, in fact, bringing to growth an otherwise stagnant IT infrastructure market. Public cloud in particular, though accounting for only around 8% of total investments, registered the highest year-over-year growth rate (35%).

On a quarterly basis, 4Q14 registered 29% growth in cloud investments, just short of $1 billion, versus a total market growth of 3%.

“The Western European market for cloud hardware was the fastest growing among the major regions at the end of 2014, and we believe it is still far from maturity,” said Giorgio Nebuloni, associate director IDC European Cloud Practice. “Though in public cloud environments the region is lagging the U.S. and China — where the largest Web players have their roots —in 2014 it went through a phase of considerable datacenter investments as U.S. multinationals like AWS, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce expanded presence to serve customers with regionally located datacenters, and native service providers fought back with investments of their own.”

CEMA

The emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, captured 18% of EMEA cloud investments in 2014.

Despite that the fact that the value in CEE was near double that of MEA, the latter is growing at a faster double-digit rate, in comparison to 2013.

Cloud infrastructure spending in the region is estimated to be 12% from the total addressable server, storage and networking hardware market. Public cloud is still below half of this share.

“Many businesses are reluctant to make the move to public cloud,” said Mohamed Hefny, senior research analyst, Systems and Infrastructure Solutions, IDC CEMA. “They opt alternatively for private cloud deployment off-premises, taking advantage of the relative maturity of local hosters.”

IDC defines cloud services more formally through a checklist of key attributes that an offering must manifest to end users of the service.

Public cloud services are shared among unrelated enterprises and consumers; open to a largely unrestricted universe of potential users; and designed for a market, not a single enterprise.

The public cloud market includes variety of services designed to extend or, in some cases, replace IT infrastructure deployed in corporate datacenters. It also includes content services delivered by a group of suppliers IDC calls Value Added Content Providers (VACP).

Private cloud services are shared within a single enterprise or an extended enterprise with restrictions on access and level of resource dedication and defined/controlled by the enterprise (and beyond the control available in public cloud offerings); can be onsite or offsite; and can be managed by a third-party or in-house staff.

In private cloud that is managed by in-house staff, “vendors (cloud service providers)” are equivalent to the IT departments/shared service departments within enterprises/groups.

In this utilization model, where standardized services are jointly used within the enterprise/group, business departments, offices, and employees are the “service users”.

 


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E-Business

NIMC Says NIN Services Back Online

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National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) has announced the restoration of its National Identification Number (NIN) verification services nationwide.

NIMC Says NIN Services Back Online

This, according to the commission, follows the completion of a system maintenance exercise.

In a statement issued on Friday, the NIMC confirmed that all previously disrupted services have resumed.

“NIMC wishes to inform the general public that the recent technical maintenance has been completed and all services have been restored,” the statement read.

The NIMC urged Nigerians seeking to enroll for NIN to visit the its official website to locate the nearest enrollment centers.

The agency also encouraged individuals to make use of its self-service portal for tasks such as data modification, including name changes.

To further ease the verification process, the Commission recommended downloading the NIMC NameAuth app (oath.app) from the Google Play Store or Apple App Store for quick and secure NIN authentication.

NIMC expressed appreciation for the public’s patience during the service disruption, which had impacted banks, telecom providers, and government agencies that rely on NIN verification for their operations.

 


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Report Reveals African Organizations Dangerously Overestimating Cyber defences

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Many businesses are overestimating their defence against cyber attacks, which creates a significant human risk blind spot. A new KnowBe4 report exposes a worrying disconnect between what leaders think about their cyber security readiness and what employees experience.

According to the KnowBe4 Africa Human Risk Management Report 2025, based on insights from cyber security decision-makers across 30 African countries, despite high awareness, a critical gap exists in turning that awareness into actual readiness and resilient behaviour.

Key findings from the KnowBe4 Africa Human Risk Management Report 2025:

Confidence vs awareness: While cyber security awareness is high, leaders express uncertainty about their workforce’s ability to act on that awareness. Many feel employees may overestimate their capabilities in recognising, reporting and mitigating threats.

The need for adaptive and personalised security awareness training: Many companies fail to personalise security awareness training to specific roles or risk exposures.

Widespread BYOD usage: A large percentage of employees (between 41% and 80%) use their personal devices for work.

AI policy development is lagging: Many companies (46%) are still in the process of developing policies for using AI tools in the workplace.

Regional variation: Southern Africa trains more, East Africa governs AI better and West/Central Africa sees the most human-related security incidents.

This gap is significant because Africa has become an attractive target to cyber criminals, especially those that launch AI-powered attacks. A LexisNexis Risk Solutions study found 60% of South African organisations have seen an increase in AI-facilitated financial crime – above the 56% global average.

Kehinde Popoola, regional manager and key representative for West and East Africa at Rubrik, said digital transformation is gaining momentum in Africa and companies are more exposed to cyber risk. The Rubrik executive adds that amid an increase in threats, it is crucial that organisations adopt an assumed breach mindset.

The KnowBe4 research shows that cyber security preparedness and the actual structures required to support secure behaviour seem misaligned.

The report highlights that just 10% of cyber security leaders are fully confident that staff would report a phishing attack or other cyber threat, despite rating employee security awareness of cyber threats at four out of five or higher.

There is also a significant perception gap between decision-makers and general employees in Africa regarding security awareness training, with 68% of leaders believing that training is tailored to roles, compared to only a third of employees feeling adequately trained.

KnowBe4 asserts that many organisations only conduct annual or biannual training that is too generic to effectively change behaviour, contributing to uncertainty about its effectiveness.

According to another report, the KnowBe4 African Cybersecurity and Awareness Report 2025, which focuses on end-user based responses, only 43% of African respondents felt confident in their ability to recognise a cyber threat, and just one in three believed their security awareness training was adequately tailored to their role. This comparison suggests the development of a dangerous perception gap in many organisations.

“There’s a disconnect here – between what leaders think is happening and what employees are actually experiencing,” says Anna Collard, SVP content strategy and evangelist at KnowBe4 Africa. “The data shows that without procedural and cultural follow-through, awareness simply doesn’t translate into readiness.”

“The continent’s cyber security posture may be more confident than it is truly resilient,” Collard adds.

 


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Domain of Deception as Attackers Deploy Spyware Under Guise of Legal Threats

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Kaspersky has detected a rapidly escalating malicious campaign that has targeted over 1,100 corporate users since June 2025. The attackers pose as a legal firm and in their emails threaten recipients with lawsuits over alleged domain name patent violations, aiming to deploy malware.

Victims who opened and launched the attached files – that mimicked legal documents – had a Trojan installed on their devices, and the attackers could spy on the content of their screens. Organisations across healthcare, finance, and education sectors have been targeted.

The campaign began with 95 emails on June 11 and has since continued to escalate. Apart from claiming that the recipient’s domain name violates patented combinations of a major brand and threatening litigation, in the email the fake legal bureau also expresses the patent holders’ interest in acquiring the domain and offers getting acquainted with the details of the alleged violations by opening the attached archive with “documents”.

It is worth noting that the attackers, likely to avoid detection, attach an archive that is not password protected, and inside it includes another archive that is password protected and a file containing the password along with it.

After the user entered the archive password and clicked on the alleged legal document inside, a Trojan was installed on the device. The user saw a message displayed that read, “This document cannot be opened on this device. Try opening it on another windows device,” and simultaneously the Tor Browser was covertly downloaded and installed in the background.

Through it, the malware regularly sent snapshots of the user’s screen to the attackers over the Tor network. The malware also autostarts whenever the computer is restarted.

“This campaign is a sophisticated blend of psychological manipulation and technical deception, leveraging fear of legal action to coerce businesses into executing harmful files hidden in attached archives. Its rapid growth since June 11 underscores the urgency for organisations to bolster defenses.

Victims face the risk of losing their private data. Robust email security, employee training, and swift incident reporting are essential to counter this evolving threat,” comments Anna Lazaricheva, spam analyst at Kaspersky.

 


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