ITWeb, in partnership with Altron Digital Business and Microsoft, conducted an online survey to examine trends around cloud adoption among South African businesses.

The survey asked about productivity suites and business applications, infrastructure and the use of artificial intelligence.

A total of 146 responses were captured, with 69% of respondents being at management level, and working in a range of major industry sectors. Some 33% of respondents came from the IT sector and 24% came from the financial services and government sectors.

Here are some of the key findings:

The majority of survey respondents (88%) are using cloud services.
Three quarters of respondents (73%) have migrated data and / or applications to the cloud.
The majority of respondents (81%) use the cloud for data storage, 60% for web hosting and 58% for application development.
When it comes to cloud services providers, just over half (53%) use Azure, 21% use AWS and 10% Google Cloud.
Microsoft 365 is used by 81% of respondents, with 10% using Google Workspace and 3% using SAP.
Asked about the current state of their IT infrastructure, 63% said it was hybrid, 23% said fully cloud-based and 13% said on-premises.
The top three challenges respondents face with their current infrastructure are: cost management (56%), skills gap or lack of internal expertise (53%) and security vulnerabilities (50%).
The primary way in which respondent organisations plan to address these challenges is through conducting a full infrastructure assessment or optimisation (48%). 36% said they’d address them by migrating to the cloud or a hybrid infrastructure. 29% said outsourcing infrastructure management and another 29% said consolidating or virtualising infrastructure.
Just over half of respondents (58%) said they were using AI technologies.
The top three challenges faced when implementing AI technologies are: security and privacy concerns (48%), lack of in-house expertise or skills (44%) and data quality or availability issues (36%).
Respondents say that cost (42%) and expertise (40%) are the most important factors when selecting a cloud services partner.

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