EDITOR ’ S NOTE
Greetings to the readers of Intelligent CIO Africa . The digital transformation journey began almost a decade ago across the Africa and Middle East region . This was accelerated by public cloud and cloud computing consumption models . Data residency and data sovereignty brought the hybrid cloud model again into focus , with private cloud being a saviour for data compliance . But across all this , enterprises were still mining the same data sets and data structures , whether for analytics or BI .
Says Smangele Nkosi at Cisco South Africa , AI readiness has declined . The largest decline was in infrastructure readiness , with gaps in compute , data centre network performance , and cybersecurity , amongst other areas . Only 20 % of organisations have the necessary GPUs to meet current and future AI demands and nearly half , 48 % have the capabilities to protect data in AI models with end – to – end encryption , security audits , continuous monitoring , and instant threat response .
Whistles were blown about the cost of holding dark data and the challenges of securing the enterprise crown jewels , but cloud databases and cloud application workloads did not change much , except for scalability , interoperability and accessibility .
Generative AI has changed all that . According to Doug Woolley at Dell Technologies South Africa , for businesses wanting to stay ahead means focusing on four key priorities . These are committing to AI , upgrading the technology stack , leading on sustainability , and enabling the teams . See p30 .
But South African enterprises are not out of the woods as yet . Despite significant AI investments in strategic areas like cybersecurity , IT infrastructure , and data analytics and management , many South African companies report that returns on these investments are not meeting their expectations . This is according to the Cisco 2024 AI Readiness Index .
Turn these pages to read more about the digital transformation that is taking place across Africa .
And in this month ’ s cover feature we describe how the South African Department of Defence , ARMSCOR , has moved from a legacy-driven reporting environment to an analytics-driven platform by implementing Qlik suite , encompassing Qlik Sense and Qlik NPrinting . By integrating Qlik , ARMSCOR has established a single source of truth , ensuring data accuracy and consistency across the enterprise . See p50 .
As we close the pages on 2024 , we wish you the best of business and transformational success in 2025 .
Arun Shankar Managing Editor arun @ lynchpinmedia . com
www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO AFRICA 7