FEATURE : CLOUD COMPUTING
Dean Maier , Cloud Practise Lead , Synthesis
With 2022 seen as the year that the industry will witness massive cloud solutions adoption in Africa industry pundits are pointing Digital Transformation strategies by organisations on the continent as the main driver . the benefit . “ You certainly don ’ t . Leveraging phased migrations and building out proof of concept ( PoC ) environments will allow you to gather learnings first within your organisation to consider further usage ,” he said . “ Another pitfall would be ‘ the great stall ’. This is when a business case and PoC have been proven however there is no strategic initiatives or ownership to drive cloud adoption . Ensure that you equip an initiative owner with the ability to drive adoption as well as establish a cloud centre of excellence ( CCoE ) so that patterns and learnings can be evangelised through the organisation .
According to Maier , the greatest challenge would have to be local presence . “ Naturally this is quite challenging in that there needs to be enough demand in a region to warrant local presence of a data centre or at least some form of co-located compute or networking resources . Besides demand , local presence is also impacted by factors such as physical security , geographic constraints , and electricity availability ,” he noted .
Mishra pointed out that Digital Transformation has been proceeding at a steady pace across Africa for a while now . “ The region ’ s telcos have been gradually putting infrastructure in place to deliver robust , highly available , scalable cloud services . Freshworks believes 2022 will be a period of accelerating momentum in this space ,” he said . “ Global hyperscale providers are taking notice of the emerging opportunities . Both AWS – a key partner for Freshworks – and Microsoft already have physical cloud data centres in South Africa , for example . As big players arrive , service ecosystems will spring up around them . And widespread cloud-based innovation will follow . It is an exciting time .”
SAP ’ s Beveridge agreed with Mishra on the pace of Digital Transformation in Africa and said with relatively low levels of legacy on-premise technology , African enterprises have an opportunity to leap ahead by adopting cloud technologies from the outset . Similarly , he added to how the continent largely skipped the broadband era and adopted 3G and other mobile connectivity options . “ African enterprises could forego investment in on-premise technologies in favour of cloud technologies . In light of this and the broader shift to digitisation in the wake of the pandemic , we expect double-digit growth in the African cloud market in 2022 ,” Beveridge said . p
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