by SAVIOUS KWINIKA
JOHANNESBURG, (CAJ News) – AS artificial intelligence (AI) adoption accelerates across Africa, organisations are facing growing pressure to secure, manage and recover massive volumes of critical data amid escalating cyber threats and ransomware attacks.
Global data resilience company Veeam says African businesses must urgently strengthen data governance, recovery systems and cybersecurity frameworks as AI-driven environments become increasingly complex.
Responding to exclusive questions from CAJ News Africa, Veeam General Manager and Senior Vice President for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Tim Pfaelzer said AI was dramatically increasing both the value of enterprise data and the scale of digital risk.
“Artificial intelligence is increasing the value of enterprise data, and in the agentic era it is also increasing the speed and scale of risk,” Pfaelzer said.
He noted that organisations now require stronger visibility into what data exists, who or what can access it, and whether clean recovery remains possible after cyber incidents, outages or AI-driven errors.
To address these challenges, Veeam has introduced the Veeam DataAI Command Platform, designed to create what the company describes as a trusted operational layer between AI systems and enterprise data.
“With Veeam DataAI Command Platform, data, access, identities and AI converge in a connected trusted layer,” Pfaelzer explained.
The platform is powered by the DataAI Command Graph, which provides visibility across production and backup systems simultaneously to help businesses enforce governance and improve recovery precision.
The executive warned that many organisations still overestimate their recovery capabilities.
According to the Veeam Data Trust and Resilience Report 2026, although 90 percent of organisations believe they can recover within defined objectives, only 28 percent of ransomware victims fully recovered all affected data.
African small and medium enterprises (SMEs), many of which are still navigating digital transformation, face additional challenges linked to mixed technology environments, limited specialist skills and constrained budgets.
Pfaelzer said Veeam was addressing these issues through solutions spanning on-premises systems, cloud environments and Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms.
The latest Veeam Data Platform v13.1 preview introduces more than 70 enhancements focused on “secure-by-design” resilience, including stronger identity recovery systems.
To simplify operations further, the company also unveiled a DataAI Resilience Module aimed at reducing operational complexity while centralising resilience management.
Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting backup systems and recovery infrastructure rather than only attacking production environments.
“Ransomware and cyberattacks increasingly target the ability to recover,” Pfaelzer said.
He added that Veeam Intelligent ResOps, initially launched for Microsoft 365, enables organisations to investigate incidents faster and restore only affected systems instead of conducting broad rollbacks.
Pfaelzer also warned African organisations against overreliance on automation without proper governance controls.
“The biggest risk is losing visibility while assuming control,” he said.
According to Veeam research, 43 percent of organisations believe AI adoption is outpacing their ability to secure data and models, while 40 percent have not yet updated policies to address AI-specific threats.
Looking ahead, Pfaelzer believes AI will transform resilience from reactive recovery into precision recovery driven by faster threat detection and more intelligent restoration systems.
However, he stressed that discipline, governance and proven recoverability would remain essential foundations for African businesses embracing the next phase of digital innovation.
– CAJ News