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[Africa Cloud Review] Simon Ngunjiri: Cloud-based services a must for future workforce productivity
In our last Africa cloud review article, we highlighted how the continent has been suited to jump to the cloud more than its peers. Cloud adoption in the region is expanding fast among both private and public sector organizations of all sizes.
Industry players are also rushing to grab a share of this market. Last week, Huawei,and China Telecom announced a new partnership to bring a new bundled cloud service to organisations in South Africa and across the southern Africa region. Africa’s leading carrier-neutral co-location data centre provider, Africa Data Centres also announced plans to build large hyperscale data centres throughout Africa, including the North African countries of Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt.
The project will involve building 10 hyperscale data centres, in 10 countries, over the next two years – at a cost of more than US$500m.
According to Africa Data Centres CEO, Mr Stephane Duproz, industries especially likely to be buoyed by Africa Data Centres’ expansion are the banking and growing fintech sectors, insurance and medical organisations, the public sector, hyperscale cloud providers and content providers.
This is really important considering most of these industries are still battling to adapt to what is being referred to as the new normal, due to the pandemic. Cloud-based services are now a must for future workforce productivity.
The pandemic has driven a fundamental shift in business architecture assumptions and this has made organisations shift their cloud strategies according to ‘’The future of cloud-enabled work infrastructure report by Deloitte.
‘’With most of the global workforce remote, major public cloud providers witnessed a huge surge in demand for their services’ the report says.
Rufus Kamau, a research and markets analyst at Scope Markets Kenya notes that the main factor contributing to cloud computing growth is the financial benefits such as budget savings and increased productivity.
‘’By migrating to the cloud, firms enjoy better information security and save up to 15 percent on IT costs.’ he says.
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), cloud adoption has surged in the past year and will continue to do so.
Global spending on cloud services across the board will accelerate to $1 trillion in three years, growing at a compound annual rate of 15.7%, according to IDC. Gartner's prediction is for end-user spending on public cloud services to increase by more than 18% to $305 billion this year compared with 2020.
Simon Ngunjiri Muraya is Google Cloud Architect at Incentro Africa.
