FEATURE
Abdelaziz Saidu, Country General Manager, West Africa at Cisco
For Africa, Saidu believes the next phase of adoption will therefore be hybrid, secure and AI-driven, requiring continued investment in connectivity, data centres, cybersecurity, power and digital skills.
New cloud hubs emerge
South Africa’ s position at the head of the market is underpinned by a combination of enterprise demand, carrier and data centre infrastructure and international connectivity.
Oskar Lampe, Regional Director at BCS Consultancy, points to the presence of AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle in South Africa as evidence of the country’ s relative maturity. But the cloud map is beginning to broaden.
Kenya and Nigeria are becoming increasingly important markets in sub-Saharan Africa, supported by large digital economies and growing local data centre footprints. North Africa is also developing rapidly, with Egypt and Morocco gaining strength. Oracle, for example, opened a public cloud region in Casablanca in 2026.
But Lampe argues that cloud maturity cannot simply be measured by the number of workloads that have migrated.
It depends on an entire ecosystem encompassing local computing capacity, fibre networks, reliable electricity and sufficient business demand. With Africa accounting for less than 1 % of global data centre capacity, a substantial gap remains between demand and available infrastructure. At the same time, that deficit represents a significant investment opportunity.
Murray Campbell, Managing Director: Cloud and Security, Middle East and Africa at NTT DATA,
Oskar Lampe, Regional Director at BCS Consultancy
Murray Campbell, Managing Director: Cloud and Security, Middle East and Africa at NTT DATA www. intelligentcio. com
INTELLIGENT CIO AFRICA
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