Johannesburg, 17 May 2021
South Africa’s public sector is looking to move to cloud technology to enhance efficiency, whereas the private sector is seeking cloud computing to facilitate innovation within their space, according to a recent study by ITWeb and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Both sectors seek cost savings as their second most important consideration in moving to the cloud, showed the study. Both public and private sector respondents also saw the hybrid cloud as the most suitable service model for their organisation.
Clive Charlton, Solutions Architecture lead for Africa, says while South Africa’s public sector shows commitment to moving to the cloud, they are facing some common challenges in their adoption of cloud technologies. “Overall, integration with existing systems is considered a top concern for more than half of the public sector respondents in the survey, followed by a lack of cloud skills.”
Charlton says AWS is working to help organisations overcome these hurdles. “To assist, AWS launched AWS Outposts – a fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware that allows customers to run compute and storage services on-premises, while seamlessly connecting to the rest of AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud.”
AWS is also helping address in-country skills shortages: “For students and educators, we offer the AWS Educate and AWS Academy to accelerate cloud-related learning in universities. AWS Educate gives access to resources such as AWS credits, a jobs board, and training content to accelerate cloud-related learning. We also support the Explore Data Science Academy to educate students on data science and data analytics to produce the next generation of data scientists in Africa,” says Charlton.
“AWS Academy provides AWS-authorised courses for students to acquire much demanded cloud computing skills. It has already attracted the country’s major academic institutions, including the University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, the University of Johannesburg and Durban University of Technology. By providing resources to tertiary institutes, we believe we can grow the number of cloud professionals and create a generation of cloud-native technology experts to help grow African economies into the future,” explains Charlton.
Organisations such as Sentech, a state-owned company and one of SA’s largest providers of electronic communications network services, use AWS Cloud solutions for flexibility, to drastically reduce the time and cost of deploying media services solutions and to support its Africa and globalisation strategy.
“The AWS Region in South Africa helps us with our strategy as we have ambitions to capture global markets, reduce the cost of communication and build technology skills and capacity in our country,” says Sentech COO Tebogo Leshope.
As part of a new series of events focused on digital transformation in government, AWS will host an executive webinar on Cloud Technologies to Encourage Digital Transformation on Thursday, 20 May. At this event, an expert panel will examine the opportunities and hurdles around cloud adoption by the public sector.
For more information and to register for this event, click here.