FEATURE
Eugene De Souza, SSA Cloud Sales & MEA AI Ecosystem Lead at Red Hat sees similarly strong appetite for cloud across the continent.
“ Organisations understand that cloud is a critical foundation for innovation, resilience and growth. However, there is still work to do when it comes to cloud maturity,” he said.
NTT DATA’ s latest research found that only 11 % of African organisations have reached the highest level of cloud maturity. For Campbell, however, one of the most encouraging developments is that cloud is no longer being treated simply as a technology project. It is increasingly becoming a business priority that allows organisations to compete more effectively in the digital economy.
From migration to transformation
That change in perception is fundamentally reshaping conversations between cloud providers and their customers.
Eugene De Souza, SSA Cloud Sales & MEA AI Ecosystem Lead at Red Hat, said cloud discussions once began with servers and data centres. Today, they increasingly begin with business outcomes.
He compares the evolution to renovating a house. The initial phase involves fixing the structure, moving workloads and stabilising the platform. Once that foundation is established, the conversation shifts towards how the space will actually be used.
“ Infrastructure modernisation gets you in the building. Business transformation decides what the building does for your customers,” said De Souza.
One of the biggest shifts is from migration projects towards operating models. Enterprises are no longer simply asking when their migration will be completed. Instead, the focus is on how environments will be operated, secured, governed and continuously improved.
FinOps, governance and platform teams are consequently becoming part of the cloud conversation, with cloud evolving from a one-off migration exercise into a consistent way of operating.
The second shift is towards AI and industryspecific workloads. Banks are looking at analytics and compliant AI using customer data, telecommunications operators are exploring real-time platforms for core services and retailers are turning to cloud to generate greater supply chain and customer intelligence.
Cloud, in other words, is increasingly becoming the engine behind business outcomes rather than simply an alternative infrastructure model.
Sovereignty reshapes cloud strategies
As cloud becomes more deeply embedded in critical business processes, questions around data sovereignty are also moving rapidly up the enterprise agenda.
Lampe says data sovereignty has moved beyond being purely a compliance concern and is increasingly influencing both architecture and investment decisions. More than 40 African countries now have data protection legislation, while the African Union’ s Malabo Convention has been active since June 2023.
This is contributing to growing adoption of hybrid and sovereign cloud models, allowing organisations to keep sensitive workloads locally while continuing to consume services from global cloud providers.
Lampe notes that nearly 90 % of organisations in a PwC survey are changing their cloud strategies in response to regulation, sovereignty requirements and geopolitical factors.
For infrastructure investors, clearer regulation could ultimately prove beneficial by generating predictable demand for compliant local capacity. The challenge will be avoiding excessive fragmentation while creating regulatory frameworks that strengthen trust without isolating national digital economies.
Campbell similarly describes data sovereignty as one of the defining themes shaping cloud strategy across Africa.
“ Historically, organisations viewed sovereignty primarily through a compliance lens. Today, it is also a strategic issue,” he said.
As critical processes and AI workloads become dependent on cloud infrastructure, enterprises increasingly want certainty around where their information resides, how it is governed and who can access it.
In South Africa, regulations such as POPIA, together with industry-specific data residency and privacy requirements, are already influencing cloud architectures. Similar
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