Rapidly expanding bandwidth capacities, following the landing of undersea cables, have led to the proliferation of data centres and established a solid platform for the development of cloud computing services inSouth Africa and Kenya. Enterprises are steadily embracing outsourcing and managed services for various business and technological benefits, further driving migration to cloud computing.
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Overall Cloud Computing Market in South Africa and Kenya, finds that the market earned revenues of $114.6 million in 2013 and estimates this to reach$288.0 million in 2018. Software as a Service will become the most popular cloud computing platform.
Despite widespread awareness and the fact that cloud has been around for a couple of years inKenya and South Africa, enterprises have understood and embraced cloud computing to varying degrees. By and large, actual adoption of these services continues to be dependent on sector, and more pertinently, on enterprise size.
"While private cloud services have been the main focus of tier I competitors in the large enterprise sector, the move towards public cloud is slowly gathering pace in both countries," said Frost & Sullivan Information and Communication Technologies Research Analyst Lehlohonolo Mokenela. "Small and medium enterprises, in particular, are turning to cloud computing motivated by the availability of affordable and convenient public cloud offerings."
However, security concerns and the lack of trust in third parties to manage internal IT systems are dissuading some enterprises and governments from employing data centre services. This outlook is especially prevalent in conservative verticals, such as the financial services and healthcare sectors, where security and compliance are critical to business operations. Nevertheless, insurance companies and banks are beginning to move their less critical applications to the cloud to reduce costs.
"Non-core applications, such as email and customer relationship management, will be the most commonly migrated solutions as organisations look to test the reliability of cloud services," noted Mokenela. "It will be crucial for service providers to demonstrate the security of their solutions in order to allay consumer concerns and boost uptake in the South African and Kenyan cloud computing domain."
