South Africa's cloud computing adoption is behind that of its BRICSS counterparts.
This was revealed by Grant Morgan, GM for cloud at Dimension Data, when addressing the ITWeb Cloud Computing Summit in Bryanston this morning.
According to Morgan, China (36%) is the biggest cloud computing adopter of the BRICSS states, followed by South Korea (29%), India (16%), Brazil (13%) and Russia (4%), with SA last at 3%.
Among the top inhibitors of cloud computing in SA, Morgan noted, were security and privacy concerns.
He also pointed out that governance issues are another worry for local organisations, adding that, in most instances, there are inadequate, inflexible or non-existent cloud service level agreements (SLAs).
Organisations are also hesitant to adopt cloud because of poor vendor transparency, as well as an inability to assess risks and audit cloud vendor security measures, he noted. "There is also unclear long-term return on investment and inability to monitor costs between billing cycles. Vendor lock-in created by a lack of service interoperability and poor service migration is another issue."
Organisations are worried about market immaturity, vendor fluctuations and poor service implementations, Morgan added. Most organisations are also deeply concerned about operational risk, which involves elements of data sovereignty risk, which speaks to the actual domicile of the information in service provider data centres.
Data and code portability risk is another limitation, which determines the difficulty of recovering intellectual property from the cloud, he said.
According to Morgan, when talking about data-loss risk, once an organisation's information is on a shared, multi-tenant cloud platform, mitigating the risk of inadvertent or malicious data loss is relinquished to the service provider, potentially exposing the organisation to legal and social risks.
Thus, he urged organisations to fully understand the SLAs before engaging a cloud service provider.
Share