CLOUD

[Column] 2020 pivotal for deeper cloud adoption


In a first of its new Hype series, Routed, a vendor neutral cloud infrastructure provider, will host Guy Zibi, principal analyst, Xalam Analytics, to discuss, dispel and predict the journey of the African cloud. Routed Managing Director, Andrew Cruise, says that the workshops, hosted by Teraco, will take place in both Johannesburg and Cape Town in November and will aim to assist local businesses to better understand the African cloud environment, why companies should move, what cloud services exist and how to overcome the constraints to cloud.

“We view our role within the cloud sector as an important one. There are so many aspects at play, enterprise businesses need professional and knowledgeable advice when looking to develop and implement a cloud strategy. There is a concerning lack of skills within the channel, leaving little room for movement. As a neutral provider, we hope to assist the channel to develop the skills required, while assisting the enterprise sector to successfully implement cloud strategies,” says Cruise.

Having issued their report ‘The Rise of African Cloud’ in 2019, Xalam Analytics continues to report on the local cloud market. Zibi says the internal and external forces that are leading companies to consider, and ultimately migrate towards cloud services are fairly deep-seated, and spreading across industries: “While some sectors such as financial services are leading the way, the pressures around optimising IT infrastructures and better leveraging troves of data assets are increasingly applying to broader swathes of the economy. In time, the cloud will touch all sectors of the economy.”

He says that African cloud adoption is gaining in sophistication with a notable development in the way African enterprises consume cloud services. Xalam has noted that at a broad level, there is accelerated usage of traditional SaaS and IaaS productivity, storage and compute applications: “There is also an ingrained hunger for testing and adapting cloud services to local needs in a transformative way, from using analytics to create new credit rating models to using cloud databases to reconfigure supply chains,” says Zibi.

Dave Funnell, VMware Senior Manager: Cloud Provider Business, will discuss how businesses can accelerate their journey to the cloud. According to Funnell, to innovate and react to the changing demands of the mobile cloud era, IT has to become agile, flexible and scalable as it supports and aligns with business objectives: “VMware is looking forward to discussing hybrid multi-cloud strategies and how these can drive digital business transformations. We will cover not only how IT can better harness the power of cloud, but also how organisations can avoid the mistakes others have made on their cloud journey.”

As with all evolutions, there are always constraints. Routed, together with Xalam will discuss some of the constraints still holding African enterprises from making the leap to the cloud. “In particular, we will look at why the phases of migration towards more elaborate adoption will differ from what we’ve seen in other developed and developing markets, and why 2020 will be pivotal for deeper adoption,” says Zibi.

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We cover Technology and Business trends in Kenya and across Africa. Send tips to editor@techtrendske.co.ke

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