Globeleq operates utility-scale power infrastructure across Africa, managing 1,794 MW of operational capacity through 17 power plants in seven countries, with another 683 MW under construction. Since 2002, the company has built a portfolio spanning gas generation, wind, solar PV, battery energy storage systems, and geothermal - backed by British International Investment and Norfund. With nearly 2,000 employees and regional offices in Abidjan, Cairo, Cape Town, Dar es Salaam, Douala, Johannesburg, Maputo, and Nairobi, the company runs distributed operations across critical energy infrastructure that powers households and businesses continent-wide.
The security stack reflects the complexity of protecting OT environments and multi-country operations: Azure Security and Microsoft 365 Defender anchor cloud posture, Azure Sentinel handles detection and response, Intune manages endpoints, and the network perimeter layers Palo Alto Networks, FortiGate, Juniper Networks, and Aruba Networks gear. IFS appears to handle enterprise resource planning - likely managing procurement, maintenance scheduling, and financial operations tied to plant operations. The threat surface spans SCADA/ICS systems at generation sites, corporate IT infrastructure distributed across eight African cities and London headquarters, supply chain coordination for construction projects, and regulatory compliance across multiple national jurisdictions.
For security practitioners, the operational reality involves protecting physical generation assets that can't go offline for patching, securing remote sites with variable connectivity, managing identity and access across nearly 2,000 users in dispersed locations, and maintaining visibility into both IT and OT domains. The renewable portfolio positioning means growing attack surface as solar arrays and battery storage systems - increasingly software-defined and networked - scale alongside legacy gas infrastructure. The company claims 20.7 million tonnes of lifetime CO2 equivalent emissions avoided from renewable projects, underscoring the criticality of these systems to climate goals and the potential impact of disruption.