Doing better business with Google Cloud

Google Cloud is enabling partners and customers across Africa to optimise and grow their businesses, achieving significant savings and the ability to innovate faster.

This is according to Digicloud Africa, Google's chosen reseller enablement partner in Africa.

“In Africa, we are seeing customers doing better business utilising Google Cloud,” says Gregory MacLennan, CEO of Digicloud Africa, “and we are seeing growing numbers of partners and customers who can testify to this.”

Deimos, a cloud technology and professional services company based in Cape Town, Nigeria and the UK, is a Digicloud partner and one of the biggest Google Cloud partners in Africa – recognised as Partner of the Year 2022 by Digicloud Africa.

Deimos CTO Jaco Nel says Deimos’s decision to focus on Google Cloud enabled the business to achieve strong growth. “On top of the Google value proposition, we provide value-added services to help customers optimise their environments, costs and security,” Nel says. An important new value-add is Deimos’s cost optimisation assessments, which point to areas where organisations can achieve significant savings – anywhere from 15%- 50%,” Nel says. “However, assessments are the easy part. Modifications, reconfiguration and rearchitecting are harder. But even without rearchitecting, there are significant cost savings to be realised.”

One Deimos customer to have benefited from cost savings while enhancing security and operations is Patricia, an alternative payment solutions company that facilitates the easy use of crypto-currencies for everyday transactions.

With a rapidly expanding crypto payments platform and a constantly growing team, Patricia reached out to Deimos for guidance and technical expertise.

Patricia had required a more robust and streamlined authentication and authorisation process to ensure no unauthorised engineering changes were made. Limiting access to the production environments was a top priority. As a fintech company, auditability and visibility into their platform quickly became of utmost importance. Patricia also needed to improve their scalability in the cloud, and needed to move to a more robust method of deployment and expansion in the cloud to enable the quick release of new features to the market.

Nel explains that as with many start-ups in Africa, Patricia had lacked sufficient focus on its security posture at first. “We started educating the team on best security practices using Google Cloud to improve visibility, auditability and access control,” he says.

“We also made significant traction on their cost optimisation,” Nel says. “The trend now is for customers to tighten their belts and we already managed a 30% reduction in cost through measures like rightsizing their virtual machines, rearchitecting their infrastructure and platforms to be more cloud native and using the managed services and tools Google offers.”

Deimos implemented Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud IAM, Security Command Center, Cloud Monitoring, Identity-Aware Proxy and Cloud Compute.

Google Cloud has also served as the foundation of the growth of Incentro Africa, a leading digital transformation partner in East Africa, and its customers, which include top financial services and distribution organisations.

Recognised as a top-tier place to work by Great Place To Work, as Workspace Partner of the Year 2021 by Digicloud Africa, and as a leading Cloud Computing Solutions Provider in the 5th Annual Digital Tech Excellence Awards, Incentro Africa is a Google Premier Partner and Digicloud Africa reseller and has been using Google innovation to enable digital transformation for its customers for over five years.

Incentro Africa Customer Success Manager Elizabeth Akinyi says in the early years, there was a perception in Kenya that Google was a consumer solutions company and was not enterprise ready. However, Incentro’s expertise and marketing, backed by rapid innovation from Google, has changed perceptions. “There were change drivers accelerating the growth of cloud adoption, such as the COVID-19 pandemic,” Akinyi says. She notes that high-profile customers moving to the Google Cloud have helped entrench its place as an enterprise-grade cloud and solutions portfolio. This growing adoption has seen Incentro Africa entrench its position as a leading technology partner in the region.

Among the Incentro Africa clients growing their business with Google Cloud is Twiga Foods, an e-commerce platform that distributes fresh local produce from over 1 000 farmers to 140 000 vendors across Kenya. Twiga Foods moved its core infrastructure to Google Cloud in 2015, to enable the business to scale and meet growing demand. Google Cloud enables Twiga’s dynamic pricing capability and analytics to minimise food waste and control costs.

Among Incentro Africa’s other clients are leading East and Central African insurance provider Britam, which depends on Google Workspace to enable its 2 500 agents to work independently; and Watu Credit, a major asset finance firm, which uses Google Cloud and Google Workspace to support efficiency at scale. Incentro Africa enabled SBM Bank to migrate to Google Workspace without data loss or downtime during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Incentro Africa's chief accomplishment, however, remains the signing of the Central Bank of West African States. This monumental achievement saw 1 300 employees migrated in the span of one week in eight African countries. A feat never before seen in the region.