palo alto network, The world's largest pure cyber security company said it is betting big on South Africa. According to Helmut Reisinger, CEO of Europe, Middle East and Africa, the US company sees its growth rate globally “significantly higher”.
The Nasdaq-listed company, which has a market capitalization 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 West and East. You are very, very aware of what's happening as a society, as a country, as critical infrastructure, as companies, in geopolitics,” Risinger said at a media event in Johannesburg last weekend. “We invest, especially because we see strong dynamics on the African continent.”
According to Justin Lee, the company's MD for Southern Africa, palo alto network has invested in local cloud capacity to align its offering with the growing demand from both the public and private sectors for security solutions that enforce data sovereignty.
Li did not say how much was spent on local cloud capacity or how much has been secured. However, he noted that Palo Alto Networks has partnered with Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services – as it does in other markets – to ensure that 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 “platformization” strategy, which aims to reduce fragmentation and “tool dispersion” in the cybersecurity environment.
'More with less'
Lee said, “Companies in South Africa have become smarter; they are looking for greater consolidation of equipment from OEMs and vendors. We have to shrink our equipment and learn to do more with less.”
“The strategy of that platform is to reduce the noise in the cyber security environment and also reduce the cost – especially in the African context – because cost is important. For example, we are earning in rands but spending in US dollars, so that becomes a big factor.”
Palo Alto Networks is seeing a shift toward this “platformization” among its customers globally and is driven by a change in perspective from the “best of breed” philosophy that has driven purchasing decisions in the cybersecurity industry for years.
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Speaking to TechCentral in an interview at the event, Risinger said that having separate solutions from multiple vendors is a security risk in itself, as these applications can be attacked at intervals. This architecture also causes waste, as compute and storage resources are typically provisioned for each solution, leading to high costs and multiple sources of information that do not necessarily “talk to each other” in any meaningful way.
When attacks occur, cybersecurity personnel spend more time consolidating data across platforms to figure out what's happening rather than implementing solutions to the problem.
“Going from an environment where you might have seven or more devices to one helps improve employee productivity. 'When I go to my teams, my people are smiling again,' said one of our CIO clients. That's because cybersecurity is a stressful job and removing the complexity helps teams overcome the hard work that leads to burnout,” Risinger said.
Another reason for the change in platform strategy is the increase in the use of automated tools by threat actors, which has significantly increased the number of zero-day attacks globally. The time between compromise and data intrusion is also dramatically reduced. Three years ago, the average was nine days. This has now reduced to one a day, with the fastest number of incidents recorded at just 72 minutes.
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The platform strategy comes with a strong public sector focus, where Palo Alto Networks has adopted a consultative approach to emphasize the need for a holistic rather than fragmented approach to cyber security as the government prepares for a digital overhaul of public services.
“This is not just a department issue that we are working on. We are looking at a government framework. We have designed our marketplace specifically for national government and critical infrastructure,” Li said. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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