Though South African organisations have taken a pragmatic approach to the adoption of cloud computing, the country is at a stage where cloud is becoming mature.
So said Sudarshan Roongta, VP at Oracle Insights, speaking during the Oracle Applications Day in Johannesburg last week. "South African organisations are leveraging cloud computing and it is now mature," he said.
In SA, said Roongta, SMEs earlier drove the rapid adoption of cloud computing and there has been a recent surge in large enterprise adoption.
Early adopters of cloud computing in SA are also very satisfied, he said, adding that 66% of the organisations in SA expressed "very high" confidence in cloud computing security. In Kenya, 60% have very high confidence; with Nigeria at 52%. In SA, he explained, only one in 10 decision-makers do not trust in cloud security.
Thanks to the availability of international bandwidth, cloud computing is becoming very reliable in SA, said Roongta, adding that this is also being boosted the investments being made by local telcos.
"There are rapidly rising adoption rates of cloud computing in South Africa and by the end of 2014 the adoption rate will be 66%, up from the current 56%."
Adoption is being spurred mostly by the retail and mining sectors and analysts are quite bullish about the growth rate of cloud computing in SA, he noted, adding that SA is one of the top five ICT cloud emerging markets.
"Cloud computing will be worth $215 million by 2017, growing at a CAGR of 35%," said Roongta.
According to Roongta, globally cloud computing is going mainstream with a recent survey finding that 82% of the organisations have adopted software-as-a-service; 52% cloud storage; 36% infrastructure-as-a-service; and 21% adopting hybrid cloud.
He also revealed that 20% of the organisations have been making use of cloud computing for more than five years; 40% for two to five years; and 29% for one to two years.
Roongta also noted that the majority of organisations (57%) are using cloud for human resources; 54% for e-mail collaboration; 52% for sales and marketing; 51% for customer care; 42% for supply chain; 41% for finance; 36% for sourcing; and 35% for operations management.
"Cloud conversations have changed; earlier they were departmental or subsidiary and now they are enterprise-wide. Cloud is now in the fabric of enterprise IT," he said.
Roongta said that 70% of the respondents said cloud computing is delivering tangible cost savings.
Previously, the biggest inhibitor to cloud adoption was concern about security but now, security has dropped to third place.
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