Schneider Electric bets on Africa’s industrial security gap

When a single infected USB drive can shut down an oil refinery, cybersecurity stops being a technology problem and starts being an economic one. Schneider Electric is making that argument, loudly, across Sub-Saharan Africa.

The French industrial giant is pushing deeper into the continent’s operational technology security market as African energy, mining, and power companies grapple with a problem decade in the making: critical infrastructure built on aging control systems that were never designed to withstand modern cyberattacks.

Africa’s cybersecurity market sits at roughly $680 million today and is on track to more than double to $1.44 billion by 2031, according to industry estimates. Schneider wants a significant slice of that, particularly in the industrial corridors where its automation hardware already runs production lines, refineries, and power grids.

“One of the biggest cybersecurity gaps we see is the lack of segmentation between IT and Operational Technology networks,” said Elijah Daniel, Schneider’s country sales director for process automation and software in Anglophone Africa. “A compromised email, a malicious file, or an infected USB device can become a bridge from IT systems into OT environments where critical production processes are controlled.”

The vulnerability he’s describing isn’t hypothetical. Ransomware groups have spent the better part of five years targeting energy infrastructure globally, and African operators, many still running end-of-life Distributed Control Systems and Safety Instrumented Systems, present an attractive, underprepared target. State-sponsored actors and AI-assisted attack campaigns have widened the threat surface further.

What makes the African market particularly complicated is culture as much as technology. Many plant operators still run on what the industry calls a “run to failure” philosophy, fix it when it breaks, not before. That approach made a certain rough sense in an era of mechanical failures. It’s a liability now.

“If a system is working, it does not necessarily mean it is secure,” Daniel said. “Many operational systems are still running on end-of-life platforms that hackers actively target.”

Schneider’s pitch is built around IEC 62443 security standards, pushing clients from Security Level 2, basic threat protection, toward Security Level 3, which is engineered to hold against organised attackers running sophisticated ransomware campaigns. For executives overseeing billion-dollar extraction operations, that certification carries weight beyond IT departments. It signals risk discipline to insurers, regulators, and investors.

The company’s EcoStruxure platform stitches together industrial IoT connectivity, automation, and cybersecurity monitoring into a single architecture, the kind of integrated approach that legacy-heavy African operators have historically struggled to piece together on their own.

Perhaps the sharpest argument in Schneider’s arsenal concerns safety systems themselves. Platforms like its Triconex are designed as the last failsafe in industrial environments , systems that cut operations before a gas leak or pressure buildup triggers catastrophe. If those systems can be manipulated by an attacker, the consequences extend well beyond data loss.

“Cybersecurity is the gate that protects the functionality and continuity of industrial processes,” Daniel said.

Africa is behind. Schneider is betting that knowing it comes first.