Pan-African cloud-based digital service provider inq. has announced that they are now a strategic managed security services partner of Elastic, the data management solutions and services company behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack.

The partnership was established to meet the increasing need for cybersecurity solutions in Africa and provide customers with security for connectivity and application tools to minimise their risk.

Cyber security experts have warned that ransomware remains a consistent threat to businesses in Africa.

In August 2020, during the annual ITWeb Security Summit, independent security expert Susi du Preez said African countries are lagging in enacting data protection laws, leaving citizens vulnerable to cyber attacks.

As reported by ITWeb, Du Preez said out of the 54 countries on the African continent, only 17 have data protection laws in place.

Asked about how inq. plans to differentiate itself within Africa’s increasingly competitive market, inq. CTO, Pramod Venkatesh said: “Many firms in Africa focus on segmented security i.e. a security solution for network, endpoint devices, applications, etc. inq. Is able to provide a single platform through Elastic, the ability to combine and correlate data across multiple touchpoints on the network, to identify threats and also to provide in-depth monitoring. By using AI capabilities of inq. and Elastic we can then use predictive analytics to identify threats before they attack.”

He added: “We started to use Elastic internally to provide centralised visibility across all of our operations and then transitioned this to provide visibility to our customers. The ability of Elastic to perform big data search and its Predictive AI is immensely helpful and provides value-added analytics by correlating data across multiple touch points on the networks such as routers, switches, wireless networks, CPEs, servers and security devices. As companies go through digital transformation, traditional SEIM and Monitoring tools cannot scale as the data correlation across multiple touchpoint on the network is absent. Elastic is built on scalable and distributed architecture and with the ability to build customised analytics and has AI enabled aspect to it, which we want to Leverage for our customers.”

Inq. Chairman Andile Ngcaba said: “inq. has benefited immensely from implementing Elastic’s security solutions across all of our operations in seven countries. We now want to enable our customers with the same tools to provide them with visibility across their networks, servers, security and advance their threat detection. We are confident inq. will add key value to our customers through Elastic and help our customers accelerate their digital business model.”

Doug Farber, vice president of global alliances and channels, added: “inq. is a leading digital service provider in Africa, and we are delighted to partner with them to help strengthen customers’ cybersecurity. inq’s deep understanding and connections within the African market combined with Elastic’s technology will enable .inq to provide customers with new and better innovations for managing cybersecurity for complex environments, and scale faster in their existing markets.”

Inq. is currently in seven regions in Africa and plans to leverage the partnership to roll out security and monitoring as managed services in all these markets.