Cloud has moved from technology infrastructure to competitive business advantage, and organisations are now looking to cloud environments that are custom designed to meet their specific business needs, offering trusted resilience, agility and scalability.
This is according to cloud experts at RSAWEB Business, who report that modern cloud environments should conform to customer requirements, rather than organisations having to make do with one-size-fits-all cloud packages.
Jason Karsten, cloud expert at RSAWEB Business, says there have been fundamental changes in how organisations approach cloud. “Modern cloud is a fast-changing environment. Now, organisations are prioritising cloud infrastructure that supports AI adoption and data sovereignty,” he says. “We are seeing a significant move to hybrid environments, as well as growing concern about data protection and compliance. Importantly, organisations want cloud environments that meet their specific needs and scale as they grow; they do not want 'packages' where they pay for products and services they do not use or need.”
Annelee Le Grange, Head of Business at RSAWEB, adds: “The modern cloud has the customer at the centre. Businesses today need their cloud environments to be fit for purpose. They want a solution that works for their specific requirements and strategy. Forward-looking cloud solutions that offer scale and an ability to adapt fast, will lead.”
She highlights PwC’s 2025 Africa Cloud Business Survey, which points to a new age of cloud and a shifting paradigm, characterised by a shift from basic migration to optimisation and trust-building. Geopolitical influence, AI prioritisation and risk-driven sovereignty are among the drivers of change, the survey found.
“The cloud has moved from a cost-saving alternative to on-premises infrastructure, to the default operating model for business. It changed to become hybrid and multicloud. Eighty-eight percent of organisations in Africa are planning increased budgets for optimised multicloud architectures and greater resilience, per PwC's Africa Cloud Business Survey,” Le Grange says. “The shift is also AI-led: workloads are increasingly built around AI-driven analytics, automation and fraud detection rather than simple storage and compute.”
Le Grange also emphasises the importance of connectivity in the modern cloud environment: “You cannot look at connectivity and cloud in silos. They are very dependent on each other: cloud is only as reliable as the network it is on, which is why low-latency, high-availability connectivity has become as strategically important as the cloud platforms.”
Key cloud trends
Le Grange and Karsten say there has been a significant increase in local data centre investments and local cloud maturity.
“The PwC Africa Cloud Business Survey report finds that 86% of organisations are now in the medium or high cloud maturity adoption phase,” Le Grange says. “AI is a major growth driver: from fraud detection in banking to demand forecasting in retail, AI is now the primary use case pulling cloud adoption forward, supported by policy moves like the National Data and Cloud Policy.”
Karsten notes that data sovereignty and compliance, including POPIA and sector-specific regulation in finance, government, telecommunications and healthcare, are pushing demand for local data residency and hybrid architectures that keep sensitive data onshore.
In addition, cloud resilience is now an important business continuity requirement. Load-shedding and power instability have made cloud redundancy and failover a survival issue, not just an efficiency one, they say.
Adapting to the modern cloud era
Business and technology leaders need to adapt to the changing cloud environment by focusing on a number of factors, they say.
Le Grange says: “Connectivity and cloud strategies should be combined. Cloud performance is dependent on the underlying network, so they cannot be unbundled, and should not be siloed decisions. Organisations should also adopt hybrid/multicloud deliberately, balancing cost, performance and regulatory requirements rather than defaulting to a single hyperscaler.”
For compliance, organisations should build legislation and sector regulation policies into their architecture from the beginning, and not after the fact, she says. They should also invest in digital skills as the skills shortage is a key constraint on cloud growth and expansion, as well as maturity in SA, and plan for infrastructure resilience in areas such as power, connectivity and redundancy as a core requirement, not as optional.
Cloud provider of choice for SA businesses
With a 25-year track record of connecting South African businesses, RSAWEB Business is uniquely positioned to provide the right connectivity, the right cloud solutions and the expert skills to offer cloud environments that underpin business AI adoption and ensure data sovereignty, security, compliance, scalability and agility.
Le Grange says: “As a connectivity provider serving the B2B and institutional market, our role is to be the reliable backbone underneath our clients' cloud strategies. We provide the low-latency, high-availability connectivity that hybrid and multicloud architectures depend on, while helping qualifying institutions access affordable, compliant connectivity that supports their own digital transformation. We help clients de-risk the connectivity layer so they can focus on what they build on top of it.”
Le Grange notes: “RSAWEB’s technical experts have a unique blend of cloud, networking, coding and business expertise, along with a deep understanding of what infrastructure organisations will need to support their AI journeys. Our experts work with a customer to identify the best cloud approach, required connectivity and other requirements, from the start of the journey to full adoption. Thereafter, we support, maintain and expand as required by the customer.”
Hosted in geo-redundant carrier grade data centres, RSAWEB’s cloud service assures uninterrupted service availability across geographic locations, with high availability geo load balancing and redundancy built in. RSAWEB offers guaranteed SLAs, with flexibility to manage the production environment autonomously and choose from various service and commercial terms to optimise input costs and stabilise spend. RSAWEB cloud products and services include infrastructure as a service, cloud security, software as a service, and backup and disaster recovery.
“We give customers a level of uniqueness offering complete cloud, connectivity and infrastructure services provided in an agile and scalable way. We are the strategic ISP, cloud and solutioning partner they trust for the infrastructure their entire businesses rest on,” Le Grange concludes.
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