While developed countries have largely embraced the Cloud, there is only recently a ground swell of adoption of Cloud in South Africa and the rest of Africa.
This adoption locally is being driven by business drivers such as regional expansion, cost control and staff optimization, which influences decisions just as strongly as technology considerations such as flexibility, scalability and elasticity.
“Traditionally the South African market lags Europe and the US by around 18 to 24 months when it comes to the adoption of new ICT concepts. With Cloud computing this hasn’t been any different,” said Albie Bester, Global Head of SEACOM Cloud Services and GM of Pamoja Cloud Services, a Cloud wholesale business unit.
“A year ago we were responding to concerns regarding the security and reliability of Cloud services, today we are responding to questions about Cloud adoption strategies and platform migration projects.”
Decision makers, both technical and business, are now realizing that Cloud computing is more than an advance in technology.
“It represents an opportunity for transformation of the entire organization; people, processes, and systems,” Bester added.
“This transformation is allowing organizations not only to capitalize on new market opportunities but also to avoid cost traps in a challenging economic environment.”
Enabling the Cloud
As a result, SEACOM Business (SEACOM’s direct to business offering) is seeing great adoption of its fibre connectivity as well as its private and outsourced network solutions.
“SEACOM Business’ strategy is starting to pay off,” said Kevin South, SEACOM Business channel head.
“SEACOM has been diversifying its business from bringing low-cost data transmission infrastructure to other service providers in Africa, towards offering a full portfolio of services directly and through channels to the business market.”
“Connectivity from SEACOM Business has been a game-changer, and with our high-speed data services, is no longer the inhibitor to cloud,” South added.
“Cloud enablement forms an important part of SEACOM Business’ strategy, with the company’s network interconnecting directly to various cloud CDN providers & OTT players on the African continent. SEACOM has brought much of the best global content and application platforms onto its network in Africa, allowing users to experience not only higher bandwidth speeds but also closer proximity to what businesses need to perform more efficiently. ”
At the same time, SEACOM Business is actively building the New Age Telco of tomorrow, with emphasis around automation of systems and process, SDN (Software Defined Network) and NFV (Network Function Virtualization).
“These are the key building blocks for streamlined acquisition of Internet-based products and services by business customers, channel partners and ultimately consumers alike,” South said.
Cloud and Hosting 2016
SEACOM and Pamoja will both be exhibiting at the 2016 MyBroadband Cloud and Hosing Conference at Gallagher Estate in Midrand on 25 May.
They will be joined by Cibecs, Saicom, TripleH, IntDev and AxizWorkGroup who will all be demonstrating their unique cloud service offerings.
The conference is the premier event of its kind in South Africa and will be attended by South Africa’s top cloud and hosting executives and IT professionals.
The speakers will share information about hosting services, data centres, cloud computing, virtualisation, posing infrastructure and connectivity.
