African enterprises are entering a new era of digital transformation, with organisations increasingly shifting from basic cloud adoption to more flexible and integrated infrastructure models designed to support long-term competitiveness.
Tunde Abagun, sales lead for West, East and Central Africa at Nutanix, said conversations across African boardrooms are evolving from whether businesses should modernise their IT systems to how they can do so efficiently without creating operational complexity or escalating costs.
According to him, hybrid multicloud has now emerged as the dominant operating model for enterprises across Africa, including the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, as organisations seek to balance private infrastructure, public cloud services, and emerging digital application platforms.
“Hybrid multicloud is no longer a transition phase. It has become the operating model,” Abagun said.
He noted that many organisations are grappling with growing operational fragmentation as they expand across multiple environments, leading to tool sprawl, inconsistent operations, and rising management overheads.
The situation, he explained, is particularly evident in African markets where businesses are balancing rapid digital adoption with infrastructure challenges such as inconsistent connectivity, power instability, and evolving regulatory requirements around data governance.
Abagun said the next phase of enterprise infrastructure would be driven by platform-based models capable of delivering operational consistency across environments.
According to him, enterprises are increasingly moving away from managing isolated infrastructure systems toward unified platforms that support traditional virtualised workloads, cloud-native applications, and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven services within a single operational framework.
He explained that platform thinking shifts the focus from where workloads are hosted to how they are consistently managed, regardless of whether they operate on-premises or in public cloud environments.
“Today, companies must be able to support legacy applications, cloud-native services, and AI-driven workloads simultaneously,” he stated.
The Nutanix executive added that AI adoption is accelerating the need for more adaptable infrastructure as enterprises seek systems capable of handling GPU acceleration, large-scale data processing, and predictable performance environments without deploying entirely separate technology stacks.
Rather than building isolated AI infrastructure, he said organisations are looking to integrate AI capabilities into their existing operational platforms to reduce complexity and improve scalability.
Abagun further noted that Africa’s digital economy presents a unique opportunity for businesses to build inherently hybrid and portable infrastructure models because many organisations are modernising systems while simultaneously launching new digital services.
He said this gives African enterprises the flexibility to strategically adopt cloud services while retaining control over sensitive workloads and maintaining operational resilience amid changing economic and regulatory conditions.
According to him, the future of enterprise infrastructure will be defined less by where workloads are located and more by how seamlessly organisations can operate across different environments.
“The next phase of digital transformation in Africa will not be about choosing between environments, but about building platforms that simplify operations, reduce fragmentation, and enable organisations to operate consistently across all environments,” Abagun added.
