Finnish cyber security company F-Secure has divested from the African market through a local management buy-out of the South African Consulting business.
On 14 February 2022, the local management team acquired the majority stake in F-Secure South Africa and, to reflect the new company’s direction, are rebranding to MWR.
According to the companies, the full local management team has remained in place, and will keep operations mostly the same, along with the vision and mission that the team had as F-Secure South Africa.
They said, “MWR CyberSec will tailor its consulting services to the African and Middle Eastern markets and will continue to provide security expertise through its talented local team, as well as becoming the B2B partner for F-Secure in these regions to continue to provide ongoing local support for Enterprise customers of F-Secure's managed services.”
MWR CyberSec CEO Gabriel de Sousa the decision to divest from Africa is seen as a mutually beneficial to both parties. “Both MWR CyberSec and F-Secure believe that it is in the best interests of the local office to have a more tailored approach to their local client base, focusing on delivering the most value to the African market. The MBO has allowed MWR CyberSec to be more competitive locally, while ensuring F-Secure are able to have a more targeted focus on their WithSecure launch in their other regions globally.”
He explained, “The ability to control the focus and investment of the local entity, unencumbered by the standardised operating procedures required by a global corporate entity, will allow us to focus our attention on the real-world challenges that our customers are facing and to support them through personal customer relationships and a high-quality customer experience.”
“The local focus and control are believed to be the best way to drive targeted engagement and attract new talent.”
He continued: “The South African market is filled with bright minds and over the years we’ve built our business around attracting those bright minds into our organisation and providing them with the platform to learn and grow in the cyber security field.”
“Currently we are continuing business as usual in the services we offer to our clients with the same local skills and capacity that already exists within the business. We are, however, always looking for fresh talent to train and upskill in cybersecurity and we will be continuing with that drive through the new business as well in our recruitment.”
MWR CyberSec will achieve its business goals by providing customers with two key commitments aimed at addressing their clients’ security challenges:
African-centric approach
MWR will review its current service offering and ensure it is tailored enough to the specific needs of the African market and ensure that the right questions are being asked and answered through its consultancy. This will involve prioritising its understanding of local trends and challenges and tailoring service-offerings to the real needs of clients. This will help the company work towards making the African cyber security landscape safer from threats.
He added, “Being locally owned and targeted towards the African market, MWR CyberSec aims to continue to provide its clients with top-quality engagement experiences through services and research tailored to the needs of businesses in Africa and the cybersecurity challenges that they face, while maintaining a partnership with F-Secure and continuing to both feed into, and get updates on, insights into trends and technologies across the world.”
F-Secure partnership
In order to ensure that disruptions experienced by current local clients are minimised, MWR CyberSec and F-Secure have entered into a transition partnership, with the mutual goal of a continued B2B partnership in the long-term.
MWR CyberSec and F-Secure are committed to partnering on managed services (including F-Secure Countercept and Incident Response services) for current and new clients.
De Sousa said the B2B partnership will “be heavily dependent on our clients’ needs as we continue to engage with them moving forward, but otherwise as mentioned the initial partnership entails Incident Response, Managed Detection and Response, and general community knowledge sharing.”
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