South Africa's long-term struggle with broadband limitations is not necessarily going to be addressed from one undersea cable with Seacom coming in, says David Ives, director of the Developer and Platform Strategy group at Microsoft SA.
Ives believes SA will only start experiencing the full capabilities of cloud computing on a much larger scale when the country receives faster and higher capacity broadband.
“The potential of growth in cloud computing in SA will only be unleashed when SA finally gets large data bandwidth capabilities. There are a lot of Web hosting companies using cloud infrastructure, but it's really going to start to take off when we have critical mass,” says Ives.
Ives will speak at the ITWeb Cloud Computing conference, on 24 November at The Forum in Bryanston. The conference aims to give an overview of the latest cloud computing trends and technologies, and how companies can leverage cloud computing in their business.
Inching forward
Ives will provide an overview of the debate around software provision models and how the hosting business is gearing up in SA to deliver cloud computing.
He says cloud computing is being adopted in SA, if at a sluggish pace. He blames bandwidth constraints and the fact that many companies are still wary of placing their valuable data in the cloud from a security perspective.
“We are seeing cloud computing happening in SA as a commodity. We've found that people don't mind where their servers are, as long as the cloud computing services are up to par. There are also a lot of companies deploying a private cloud.”
Some of the major players in the cloud computing space include VMware, Microsoft, Symantec, IBM, EMC, and Google.
Ives adds that local providers are investing a lot of money and forming partnerships to get their own cloud computing infrastructure on board. “Internet Solutions are doing a lot in the cloud computing sector where they're building massive data centres. MWeb are also doing a lot of things on their hosted data centre.”
A recent ITWeb cloud computing survey showed that 61% of respondents believe SA is not ready for cloud computing; mostly based on the state of the current public infrastructure. However, more than 80% of the participants said cloud computing has a significant role to play in the South African market.
According to findings in this year's F5 cloud computing research report, 77% of respondents claim efficiency is the driver for public clouds. For private cloud computing, 63% of respondents listed reducing capital cost as the main reason, while 50% of companies are looking to boost agility in the private cloud.
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