Although the notion of network-based computing stems back to the 1960s, the modern term ‘cloud computing’ arose in the 2000s. Yet, almost two decades later, South Africa still lags in both its adoption, and its use for critical functions like business intelligence (BI).
While many believe that this is largely due to a lack of local data centre infrastructure, the landing of the Azure data centres in Africa will drastically change the cloud landscape across the continent.
“This effectively eradicates the fear of shifting massive datasets offshore to global data centres,” said Kree Govender, Managing Director of South Africa Qlik Master Reseller (SAQMR).
The current hesitance towards cloud adoption in Africa is illustrated by the Qlik implementations across the continent. Statistics show that as much as 95% of Qlik’s customers in Africa are on premise.
“Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of enterprises will migrate entirely away from on-premises data centres with the current trend of moving workloads to colocation, hosting and the cloud leading them to shut down their traditional data centre,” added Govender.
“If these predictions prove accurate, the new data centres will mean there’s no longer anything holding Africa back from catching up with the rest of the world.”
Adam Barrie-Smith, Chief Technology Officer at SAQMR, believes that the Qlik platform is perfectly positioned to capitalise on the benefits that these data centres will offer.
“This will complement extensive mobile analysis testing using Qlik’s SaaS and Cloud business, leveraging Qlik Senses’ multi-Cloud capabilities,” he said.
“The first advantage is the data centre, the next will be the containerised cloud environment which is set to follow soon.”
Barrie-Smith added that one of the greatest benefits of local data centres is enhanced identity management.
“Let’s consider the impact on the banking industry, for example. Most African banks still hold on-premise hardware, which is now reaching retirement age. The question now becomes, should they invest in more hardware or virutalise? With the new data centres, our banking customers will find it much simpler and more cost effective to embrace the cloud, through a hosted layer within Azure.”
While making cloud adoption easier, the new data centres also offer rich integration capabilities, enhanced virtualisation opportunities, a more elastic environment and greater security.
“With the local Azure data centres, African organisations will be empowered to embrace hybrid cloud, and we predict a much greater cloud drive,” said Govender.
