Between October and December 2025, Kenyan systems absorbed 4.56 billion cyber threat events — a 441% jump from the previous quarter. Phishing, ransomware, credential theft. The attacks are faster, smarter, and aimed squarely at the weakest point in most business networks: employees connecting from home, coffee shops, and shared offices.
Your perimeter firewall does not protect a team member working from Karen on a personal laptop. Your endpoint antivirus does not see what happens inside a browser tab. And your IT team cannot be everywhere.
Sophos Workspace Protection was built for exactly this gap.
The Modern Threat Landscape
The numbers from Kenya's Communications Authority are difficult to ignore. In a single quarter:
- 4.56 billion detected cyber threat events — up 441% from the quarter before
- 68% surge in ransomware targeting Nairobi businesses
- 71% of attacks on banking and national security sectors started with phishing
- 750,000 email and password combinations exposed and circulating on dark web forums
Cybercriminals are no longer running blunt, scattershot attacks. They study your business, spoof your suppliers, and craft emails that look identical to your Microsoft 365 login page or a payment notification from your bank. When an employee clicks, the damage happens in seconds — often before your IT team knows anything is wrong.
Where Traditional Security Falls Short
Most businesses in Kenya have some form of protection: an antivirus, a firewall, Microsoft 365. That was adequate five years ago. It is not adequate now.
The problem is the gap between where your security ends and where your employees actually work.
Antivirus protects files on a device. It does not control what happens inside a browser — where most work, most data sharing, and most attacks now take place.
Firewalls protect the office network. The moment someone works from home or connects from a client site, they are outside that protection entirely.
Microsoft 365's built-in security helps, but it does not tell you which devices are accessing company data, whether those devices are patched, or what employees are doing in applications you have not approved.
The result: a security policy that applies only when people are in the office, on a company device, on the company network. For most businesses in 2026, that is less than half the time.
Introducing Sophos Workspace Protection
Released in early 2026, Sophos Workspace Protection is a new category of security designed to follow your employees wherever they work — not just where your IT infrastructure reaches.
It brings together device trust, network access control, DNS filtering, and email monitoring into a single solution centred on a hardened enterprise browser. Your team installs it once. You manage everything from one dashboard. No new hardware. No change to how your staff works.
As a certified Sophos partner, Sentire Kenya deploys, configures, and monitors Sophos Workspace Protection for businesses across Nairobi and beyond.
Key Components of Sophos Workspace Protection
Sophos Protected Browser
Built on Chromium — the same engine as Google Chrome — the Protected Browser looks and feels familiar to your team. No retraining required. Underneath, it enforces your security policies: blocking malicious websites, controlling which data can be downloaded or printed, restricting access to applications you have not approved. Sophos ZTNA is built directly into it, so secure application access comes as standard.
Sophos ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access)
Zero trust means the network trusts no device and no user by default — including your own staff. Sophos ZTNA verifies the identity of the user and the health of the device before granting access to any application. A team member on an unpatched personal laptop gets restricted access. A managed, up-to-date company machine gets full access. Critically, your applications become invisible to the internet — attackers cannot target what they cannot find.
Sophos DNS Protection
Every website visit starts with a DNS lookup — a query that translates a web address into a destination. Sophos DNS Protection intercepts that query and blocks connections to malicious domains before the page even loads. It works across browsers and applications, catching threats that slipped past both the browser and the endpoint layers.
Email Monitoring System
Phishing remains the entry point for the majority of attacks on Kenyan businesses. The Email Monitoring System connects to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace via API — no changes to your mail routing, no disruption to your team — and scans for impersonation attempts, malicious links, data exfiltration, and AI-generated phishing content that traditional spam filters miss.
Real-World Use Cases
The remote finance manager
Your accountant works from home two days a week. She accesses your accounting system, approves payments, handles payroll. With Workspace Protection, her access is governed by device posture. On her managed, patched company laptop: full access. On her personal machine: sensitive financial applications are restricted until the device meets your policy.
The employee who almost clicked
A staff member receives an email that looks exactly like a notification from your internet provider, warning of an account suspension. She clicks. Sophos DNS Protection blocks the connection to the phishing domain before the fake login page loads. The attack stops. She never knew how close it came.
The short-term contractor
You bring in a contractor for three months and give them access to project files on Microsoft 365. With ZTNA, they get access to exactly those files — nothing else. When the contract ends, you revoke access from one dashboard in under a minute, without touching their device.
Business Value and ROI
A single ransomware incident costs a mid-sized Kenyan business an average of KES 3–8 million in recovery costs, operational downtime, and reputational damage. That figure does not include potential penalties under Kenya's Data Protection Act 2019 for breaches involving personal data.
Sophos Workspace Protection is available on a monthly subscription through Sentire Kenya, managed under a flexible MSP arrangement. No large upfront costs. No hardware. No dedicated security analyst required on your side — our Nairobi-based engineers monitor and respond on your behalf.
What you get:
- One dashboard covering browser security, network access, DNS, and email
- Protection that travels with your team — office, home, or anywhere in between
- Device trust policies that enforce your standards without disrupting how people work
- Full visibility into shadow IT and unsanctioned application use
- A Sophos-certified engineering team based in Nairobi, available when you need them
Your team is already working from everywhere. The question is whether your security is keeping up.
If you are not sure whether your current setup covers remote devices, home networks, and browser-based work — it probably does not. A free security assessment with our engineers takes 45 minutes and gives you a clear picture of where the gaps are.
Talk to a Sentire engineer today — no obligation, no sales pitch, just answers.