South Africa could be on the verge of a rapid rush in cloud adoption.
So said Clinton Jacobs, senior IT analyst at BMI-TechKnowledge, at the Telkom Business Cloud Computing Executive Forum in Johannesburg yesterday.
Global research indicates SA is among the developing countries with strong digitisation potential, said Jacobs, citing a 2014 report by the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
The Digital Evolution Index gauges the digital transformation of economies in the developed and developing worlds. The index divides countries into four categories: "Stand Out" countries which have established and continue an upward digitisation trajectory, "Stall Out" countries which have achieved much but are falling behind, "Break Out" countries which, although not currently very digitised, are poised for rapid digitisation in the future, and "Watch Out" countries, which continue to struggle with digitisation. South Africa is a "Break Out" country.
Jacobs believes SA's digitisation potential could mean it is currently at a critical "tipping point" for cloud adoption. There are several factors feeding into this tipping point, he said.
One prominent factor is data centre proliferation, Jacobs said. Roughly 50 000 square metres of commercial IT space is available to the market from services providers, over 20 000 square metres of which is unutilised, he said. With servers becoming denser and more power-hungry, "we will run out of power long before we run out of data centre space available to the market."
Another factor is connectivity expansion, Jacobs continued. Recent upgrades to the submarine cable systems connecting SA to the rest of the world, as well as the long-awaited implementation of fibre, will lead to significant connectivity improvements for businesses in SA, he explained.
Data transfer improvement also makes cloud more appealing, Jacobs went on. These include High-Efficiency Video Coding, Aspera FASP, and BitTorrent for enterprise, which, despite its connotation with piracy, is ideal for file-sharing in corporate environments, he said.
Improvements in security and regulation also encourage cloud adoption, Jacobs concluded, noting the Protection of Personal Information (POPI) act could provide some of the data protection regulations needed in a cloud-heavy economy.
Many of the objections businesses have to cloud adoption come from a place of misinformation and biased comfort with traditional infrastructure, said Jacobs. As cloud is adopted and these objections are resolved, stakeholders will start to see the value in cloud and acceptance will become more widespread, he predicted.
Share