Dolos, WatchGuard's master distributor in Africa, has brought WatchGuard CloudDR to the African market and is offering businesses a free cloud risk assessment: a seven-day, agentless evaluation of their cloud environment, followed by a guided review of the findings mapped against CIS Controls and NIST CSF. The assessment is completely obligation-free.
The offer responds to a shift two decades in the making. Firewalls secured the network perimeter, endpoint protection safeguarded every device, and multi-factor authentication verified every login. Together these defences raised the bar for attackers – and forced them to look elsewhere.
"We've made networks and devices significantly more resilient to attack,” says Dominic Richardson, CEO of Dolos. Attackers haven’t disappeared, they've simply shifted focus to an area many businesses still leave exposed: the inside of their cloud applications. This isn't a failure of traditional defences; it's proof of their effectiveness in forcing attackers to find new paths in."
As businesses embrace cloud and AI tools, three often-overlooked security risks continue to create opportunities for attackers:
- Identity security: Increasingly, attackers don't hack in, they log in. Stolen credentials, hijacked session tokens and dormant over-privileged accounts turn legitimate access into a breach. MFA is rightly standard practice, but determined attackers now target what happens after a successful login.
"MFA is non-negotiable. Any business leader without it should stop what they're doing and make deployment an immediate priority,” says Dolos Chief Technical Officer, Matthew Stevens. "But a lock only controls who gets in. It can't tell you what someone does once they're inside. Attackers know that after login, almost nobody is watching. In most businesses we assess, no one can tell us what their identities actually did in the cloud last week.”
- Cloud misconfigurations: Cloud environments often inherit default settings that favour accessibility rather than security, creating opportunities for exposure through open sharing, excessive permissions and configuration drift. "Nobody decides to be exposed," Richardson notes. “You don't create exposure overnight. It grows one reasonable exception at a time, and attackers succeed not because they're smarter, but because they look first."
- Shadow IT: Employees regularly connect productivity tools and SaaS applications to business systems, often without IT approval. Many are granted direct access to company data, creating unmanaged security and compliance risks. Initial cloud assessments frequently reveal far more connected applications than organisations expect.
For African organisations, the stakes are especially high. Rapid cloud adoption has transformed the way businesses operate, often faster than the security practices around them. Coupled with regulatory requirements such as South Africa's POPIA, Nigeria's NDPA and Kenya's Data Protection Act, cloud exposure now represents not only a cyber security risk but also a significant compliance and reputational challenge.
Richardson challenges business leaders to answer three straightforward questions: “How many applications currently have access to your environment? Which accounts hold unnecessary privileges? And how quickly could you detect a compromised credential?” When organisations struggle to answer them confidently, it reveals the visibility gap that has fuelled the growing demand for cloud detection and response.
Platforms like WatchGuard CloudDR connect to SaaS applications through agentless APIs and work continuously, surfacing connected apps and AI tools that IT never approved, evaluating configurations against best practices and monitoring identities for signs of compromise. When something is wrong, it doesn't just alert, it remediates automatically.
Richardson advocates a data-driven approach: verify with evidence, not opinion. Measure the reality of your exposure instead of relying on assumption, which is exactly what the free assessment is designed to do. Whether the results confirm that an environment is secure or surface areas that need attention, the outcome is certainty.
"An assessment tells you where you stand today, and most businesses have never had that", says Richardson. "But a cloud environment doesn't hold still. Permissions drift, staff connect new tools, credentials leak. A snapshot ages the moment it's taken. The only version of your risk an attacker cares about is the one that exists right now."
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