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By Tunde Abagun, Sales Lead for West, East, and Central Africa, at Nutanix
Nigeria’s digital economy has reached a point where cybersecurity can no longer be treated as a specialist concern confined to the IT department. Every major step forward in digital adoption increases the value of the systems, data, and services behind daily life.
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Payments, identity platforms, company registries, banking services, public portals, education systems, telecommunications networks, and enterprise applications are all becoming part of the country’s economic infrastructure. When those systems are disrupted, the effects quickly move beyond technology.
That is why the recent rise in cyber incidents in Nigeria reflects the country’s stage of digital development. As more transactions, records, and services move online, Nigeria becomes more attractive to attackers.
The proposed Ministerial Advisory Council for Cybersecurity Coordination is an important signal. Its focus on continuous accountability, trusted intelligence sharing, national coordination, and strategic risk foresight recognises that cyber resilience requires a coordinated national posture that brings together government, regulators, industry, academia, and technology providers.
That is important because much of the public’s daily digital experience happens through banks, fintech platforms, telecoms providers, retailers, insurers, universities, health providers, cloud services, and enterprise platforms. Many of these organisations are now gateways to the digital economy. Their ability to withstand disruption shapes public confidence.
Beyond traditional cybersecurity
This is the right time for Nigerian organisations to widen the cybersecurity conversation. Security tools remain essential, from identity controls and monitoring to endpoint protection, threat intelligence, incident response, and skilled teams. The next level of maturity requires equal attention to the infrastructure layer that keeps services available, protects data, and enables recovery during an attack.
A cyber incident becomes more damaging when an organisation cannot isolate affected workloads, restore data, locate critical systems, or apply consistent controls. In many enterprises, fragmentation is the weakness that attackers can exploit.
That fragmentation is understandable. Organisations have modernised in stages, with core applications in private data centres, digital services in public clouds, databases across multiple platforms, and new applications in containerised environments. Legacy systems often remain business-critical, while security and recovery processes develop separately for each environment.
A consistent infrastructure operating model helps reduce these operational blind spots. When organisations can manage workloads, policies, data protection, and recovery across private cloud, public cloud, and edge environments with greater consistency, they create fewer blind spots.
Managing risk
Nigeria’s digital economy will continue to grow. The Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy has spoken about the relationship between digital growth and rising cyber exposure, and that relationship is real. More connectivity, platforms, and digital services will create more opportunities for citizens and businesses.
Tunde Abagun – Nutanix
AI-driven threats add another layer of pressure. Attackers can use automation, synthetic content, social engineering, and faster vulnerability discovery to accelerate campaigns. Defenders need better intelligence sharing and stronger governance, but they also need environments that can withstand pressure. Recovery must become as disciplined as prevention.
For many Nigerian enterprises, this means asking harder questions. Can we recover critical applications quickly after a ransomware attack? Do we know which systems must be restored first? Are our backups isolated and tested? Can we move workloads if a site, cloud region, or service becomes unavailable? Can the board see cyber resilience as an operational capability rather than a compliance report?
At Nutanix, we see this increasingly through the lens of hybrid multicloud operations. Nigerian organisations will continue using different infrastructure environments because workloads have different requirements. Public cloud scale may suit certain applications. Others require closer control due to data sensitivity, latency, cost, or integration with existing systems. Edge environments also matter where services need to run closer to users, devices, or local infrastructure.
Rethinking the approach
A platform approach can help. By simplifying infrastructure operations across environments, organisations can reduce complexity, strengthen governance, and improve recovery planning.
The private sector has a central role to play. The government’s proposed cybersecurity coordination plan recognises the need for collaboration, which will be strongest when enterprises bring practical operational maturity to the table. Incident information, threat intelligence, sector lessons, and recovery practices need to move through trusted channels. Financial institutions, telecoms providers, cloud operators, universities, public agencies, and technology companies all hold information and operational experience that can strengthen the response.
Awareness matters, although trust ultimately depends on how digital systems perform under pressure. Citizens and businesses need confidence that services will remain available, data will be protected, and incidents will be handled with accountability. That confidence is built through preparation before an attack, transparency during response, and disciplined recovery afterwards.
Nigeria’s cybersecurity challenge is inseparable from its digital growth story. Sustaining the country’s digital momentum will require a security and recovery model that matches the importance of the systems now being built.
Organisations that treat this seriously now will protect the trust that allows people, businesses, and public institutions to use digital services with confidence.
