As cloud environments become more accessible and affordable, enterprises are fast moving towards a cloud-first strategy as a cost-effective and agile approach to scale business operations and optimise performance across digital channels.
Cloud Africa 2018, a research project conducted by World Wide Worx and F5 Networks, across Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa on three hundred medium and large organisations, revealed uptake in cloud infrastructure spending to aid in digital transformation.
Among the benefits of moving to the cloud cited in the research were technology innovation, better market penetration, enhanced customer/end-user experience, and better integration and collaboration across current infrastructure deployments.
The cloud is rapidly becoming the preferred environment for the automation, management and deployment of ERP software and the virtualisation of critical business processes and applications.
Cloud efforts by African enterprises include the migration of applications and workloads from on-premises data centres to the cloud and even the development of cloud-ready and cloud-native applications to remain relevant.
Some interesting findings of the research:
- Around 83% of South African enterprises will continue to increase their cloud spending throughout 2018
- Only 5% local organisations (mostly engineering) will reduce their cloud spending
- Circa 94% of Nigerian businesses and 98% of Kenyan companies will invest in cloud infrastructure this year
- Nigeria and Kenya are expected to overtake South Africa regarding cloud infrastructure adoption by the end of the year
- As much as 50% to 75% of applications are expected to become cloud-native by 2021 compared to today’s 25% norm
Cloud computing continues to be a priority and the first transformative process undergone by African organisations alongside business intelligence (BI) adoption, Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality (VR) or 3D printing technology.
Read more about the research findings here.
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