FEATURE: GENETEC

In a landscape defined by massive data volumes and converging technologies, African organisations are struggling to turn video and access data into actionable operational intelligence. Quintin Roberts, Regional Sales Manager – Africa at Genetec, details the core challenges from the friction of integrating legacy systems to the need for proactive, predictive threat detection. He outlines how Genetec is tackling these hurdles through AI-analytics, unified platforms and a strategic focus on empowering local teams to secure critical sectors like mining, banking and infrastructure across the continent.

The core data challenges facing African organisations aren’ t primarily about connectivity; they centre on overcoming siloed data storage. When critical information is locked away in disparate systems or‘ containers’, organisations simply cannot achieve the comprehensive view needed to detect meaningful trends and make informed decisions.

Our platform directly addresses this fragmentation. By centralising and unifying this crucial data, we can effectively reveal operational inefficiencies, rapidly detect risk patterns or trends and identify predictive behaviours.

Ultimately, this unified approach delivers tangible business advantages: it translates to faster decisionmaking, significantly reduced downtime and the ability to accurately measure return on investment( ROI) through genuine data-driven situational awareness.

As IT and physical security converge, what are the most common friction points or security gaps that African organisations encounter when trying to integrate diverse, legacy, or proprietary systems?

Traditional systems inherently tend to lock valuable data into silos, which invariably creates critical blind spots and introduces significant risk compliance vulnerabilities.

Our platform is engineered to mitigate this friction. We achieve this by securely integrating both legacy and modern systems together, providing a single command view across the entire environment.

This essential convergence between the old and the new is key to strengthening cyber and physical resilience across the organisation’ s infrastructure. Crucially, it provides executives such as CIOs with unified visibility and control over their entire operational estate.

Beyond responding to an alarm, what are the primary security monitoring limitations that prevent organisations in sectors like banking and healthcare from moving to truly proactive, predictive threat detection?

Traditional monitoring fundamentally relies on simple alarms and reactive, event-based triggers. However, the future of security monitoring is built on foresight and data-driven solutions.

AI-powered analytics are transforming this landscape. They are capable of instantly detecting abnormal behaviour and identifying emerging security trends. They can also automate or trigger automated responses based on these analytical detections.

By moving from a purely event-based analogue trigger to a system that enables trend prediction, organisations can truly and effectively transition

24 INTELLIGENTCIO AFRICA www. intelligentcio. com