Tahir Latif, chief trust officer for EMEA at Securiti AI, a Veeam company.
ITWeb, in partnership with Veeam, is conducting a survey to explore data trust, resilience and AI readiness across Africa. The survey aims to uncover how companies across the continent are approaching data visibility, recovery confidence, AI readiness, classification, access awareness, governance, regulation and investment priorities in an increasingly complex digital environment.
As companies accelerate cloud adoption, digital transformation and AI initiatives, the ability to trust, govern and recover data has become a critical business requirement. Building data and AI trust is now essential to enabling secure innovation, ensuring that data is not only protected and available, but also reliable and ready to power AI-driven outcomes. The survey seeks to provide insight into whether African companies have the visibility and control needed to support secure innovation and operational resilience.
According to Tahir Latif, chief trust officer for EMEA at Securiti AI, a Veeam company: “With this survey, we’re not just asking whether organisations feel confident, we are examining whether that confidence is backed by evidence. In other words, can organisations prove where sensitive data sits, who accessed it, whether it is classified, whether it is protected and whether clean, trusted data can be recovered after an incident?
“The tested recovery question and the AI adoption stage questions should help us tell a much stronger story around data confidence, resilience and AI readiness across Africa, especially if there is a gap between how confident organisations feel and how recently they have tested recovery. Ultimately, this is about whether organisations have the trusted data foundation required to adopt AI at scale.”
The survey differentiates between companies operating in a single African country and those operating across multiple countries on the continent. According to Latif, this distinction is important because operational and regulatory realities differ significantly.
“A single country organisation and a multi-country African organisation will have very different issues around data residency, regulatory complexity, cloud architecture and AI governance,” he explains.
The research also explores how confident companies are that they have an accurate and up-to-date understanding of where their most sensitive and business-critical data resides across on-premises systems, cloud environments, SaaS applications, endpoints and backup repositories.
“The real risk is often not in the main system everyone knows about. It is in copies, exports, SaaS platforms, endpoints, collaboration tools and backup environments,” says Latif. “Without full visibility and control across this data estate, organisations risk undermining both resilience and trust in the data feeding their AI systems.”
In addition, the survey examines how prepared companies are to recover clean, trusted and usable data following a ransomware attack or destructive cyber incident within agreed recovery targets. Respondents are also asked to assess their company’s ability to discover, classify, govern, protect and recover critical data assets, as well as their readiness to adopt, govern, secure and scale AI initiatives using trusted and well controlled data.
The findings are expected to provide valuable insight into how African companies are balancing innovation with governance and resilience, while highlighting the maturity of data management and AI strategies across different sectors and regions on the continent.
IT leaders, security professionals and business decision-makers are encouraged to participate in the survey and share their perspectives on the state of data trust and AI readiness in Africa. Participants will also stand a chance to win a Takealot or Amazon voucher valued at R5 000.
Ultimately, the survey aims to help companies benchmark their current levels of data confidence and AI preparedness against broader market trends. The results will offer a clearer picture of where African businesses stand in their journey towards trusted data, cyber resilience and responsible AI adoption, while identifying the key gaps that still need to be addressed to unlock the full value of AI-driven transformation.
