Cyber resilience governance - shift from IT to boards

Cybersecurity has shifted decisively from an IT concern to a core business risk, and South African organisations are feeling this change acutely. The World Economic Forum's Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 [1] in collaboration with Accenture, highlights a global environment where cyber risk is intensifying in scale, complexity and impact.

- Boland Lithebe

Over the past year, these pressures have become more visible locally, as South African companies contend with rising digital adoption, growing reliance on cloud and Al-driven systems, and increasingly sophisticated cybercrime that directly targets economic value rather than just data.

Expanding attack surface

South Africa's economy is deeply connected to global digital systems, from financial services and telecommunications to logistics, mining and retail.

This interconnectedness brings opportunity, but it also widens the attack surface. The past 12 months have seen a notable increase in ransomware, business email compromise and supply-chain-related cyber incidents affecting African organisations, including South African firms. These attacks are no longer opportunistic. They are often well-resourced, persistent and designed to exploit gaps between business operations, third-party relationships and cybersecurity governance.

Attackers using AI faster

One of the most relevant themes from the Outlook is the growing asymmetry between attackers and defenders. Cybercriminals are adopting Artificial Intelligence (Al) faster than many organisations are able to secure it.

In South Africa, Al is being integrated into customer service, credit decisioning, fraud detection and operational analytics at pace. While this brings efficiency and scale, it also introduces new vulnerabilities, particularly where governance frameworks, skills and controls lag behind deployment.

The result is a widening gap between innovation and protection that business leaders can no longer afford to ignore.

Critical skills gap