ADC is part of Cassava Technologies a pan-African technology leader providing a vertically integrated ecosystem of digital services and infrastructure enabling digital transformation across Africa.

As a key stakeholder with over three decades in the Data Centre, Cloud, Connectivity, and Managed IT Services industries, Dr. Krish is renowned for his significant contributions in building the most number of data centres in the region.

Dr Krish is vastly experience in incubating startups and positioning them as challengers in high growth markets where they operate.

His impressive experience in running businesses includes complete life cycle management of the business includes: business planning, end-to-end P&L ownership, product development, sales/business development, go-to-market strategies formulation and execution, establishing multi megawatt Data Centre projects, service delivery, procurement, HR, finance and other business support functions, establishing systems and processes including integrated BSS and OSS automation, as well as applying the latest AI trends across the business-functions

He is a recipient of several awards by various institutions recognizing his impeccable contribution toward the development of the Data Centre Industry and the overall ICT sector in Africa over the years.

In this interview, Dr. Krishnan Ranganath, the regional executive – West Africa & Morocco- at Africa Data Centres (ADC), speaks on sundry issues impacting the tech industry. Excerpt:

Would you say the 2024 global economic challenges still affect the tech industry, particularly from your perspective in Africa?

Dr. Krish: 2024, a year of significant uncertainty across the globe, also had its share of challenges for Africa. However, we chose to take these challenges as learning opportunities—making the necessary adjustments and finding ways to adapt and move forward.

In the tech industry, change is constant; each day brings something new. We saw the rise of Nvidia and AI, and now, overnight, we’re discussing Deepseek. As a tech professional, it’s crucial to stay adaptable and embrace global changes while exploring how to apply them locally and regionally.

Technology continues to evolve daily, infiltrating our personal lives and promising more advancement throughout the year. These developments are likely to create significant employment opportunities across various sectors.

What strategic priorities should the tech industry focus on in 2025 to stay competitive?

Dr. Krish: In the midst of a rapidly changing technological landscape, companies are navigating the transformative power of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT). A striking 85% of businesses report that adopting AI has already improved productivity. McKinsey notes that companies using AI extensively can increase their cash flow by 122% over a five-year period.

These innovations are reshaping industry frameworks and altering competitive dynamics—startups leveraging blockchain technology are disrupting financial services and attracting substantial funding. This shift compels established players to rethink strategies, invest in digital transformation, and adapt to new consumer expectations driven by rapid technological advancements.

Looking at 2025, AI is at the centre of global conversations, supported by big data, cloud computing, and cybersecurity, which play a critical role in the tech ecosystem.

What trends are shaping data centre adoption in Africa amid the rise of cloud and AI?

Dr. Krish: As the drive to develop artificial intelligence and related technologies grows, so does the demand for data processing capacity—fuelling a data centre boom across Africa, despite infrastructure challenges.

In recent years, investment in African data centres has increased, though not at the same scale as more established economies.

Since 2022, new carrier-neutral data centres have been commissioned, with more in the pipeline. Key construction activity is underway in Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, and South Africa. These developments are supported by efforts to improve regulatory frameworks, energy infrastructure, and connectivity—while also promoting digital transformation, cloud adoption, and addressing the skills gap.

However, the continent still lags behind global benchmarks, accounting for less than 2% of the world’s co-location data centre supply. Notably, more than half of this capacity is concentrated in South Africa, according to the Africa Data Centres Association.

Currently, cloud services for Africa are largely served from South Africa and Europe. As demand rises, we’re seeing the emergence of local cloud regions in Nigeria and Kenya, with further expansion expected in Morocco, Egypt, and other countries.

What are the best ways for industry stakeholders to collaborate and accelerate data centre adoption in Africa?

Dr. Krish: Among African data centre operators, we have five to six key players. Collaboration should focus on capacity sharing across locations and real-time communication regarding available resources.

Initiatives like the Africa Data Centres Association (ADCA) are gaining traction, and we expect greater clarity on collaborative strategies moving forward.

We also need to prioritise human capacity building and enhanced network connectivity between data centres. This will simplify client operations across multiple providers and drive a more integrated infrastructure ecosystem.

What role should governments play in accelerating Africa’s data centre expansion?

Dr. Krish: Take Nigeria as an example—regulatory bodies like the NDPC and NITDA play pivotal roles in driving data centre growth. When governments advocate for digitalisation and data localisation, the local cloud and data centre industries benefit significantly.

A major opportunity lies in repatriating African government data—over 75% is currently hosted outside the continent. Bringing this data back home would be a substantial driver for local industry, demonstrating leadership from the front.

Additionally, governments should consider reducing customs tariffs on data centre-related imports. While free zones exist, most are located outside city limits—areas where clients typically prefer data centres to be.

Do you see a substantial market opportunity for data centres in Nigeria?

Dr. Krish: The Nigerian data centre market presents significant growth opportunities, driven by increasing cloud adoption, digitalisation, and the need for secure and scalable data storage.

The market size is estimated at 136.7 MW in 2025 and is expected to reach 279.4 MW by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 15.37%.

Additionally, colocation revenue is projected to increase from USD 251.1 million in 2025 to USD 578.1 million by 2030, reflecting a CAGR of 18.15%.

Data localisation initiatives and digital transformation efforts are driving profound changes in the Nigerian data centre market, with government emphasis on local data hosting leading to increased domestic investments.

But in 2025, this tradition may be past its expiry date. Why? Because our over-reliance on passwords is becoming the very risk we seek to avoid.

According to Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report (2024), 81% of breaches still involve weak or stolen passwords.

As threat actors evolve and AI becomes part of their toolkit, even the strongest passwords can be broken in minutes, not months. It’s time we ask — are we clinging to an outdated security method that’s holding us back?

The Problem with Passwords Today

The data is damning. According to Nordpass, the weak password of “123456” persists in being used as a password, easily cracked within 1 second by hackers.

An online security survey by Google and Harris Poll in February 2019 found that at least 65% of people reuse passwords across multiple, if not all, sites, exposing them to credential-stuffing attacks at scale.

Newer threats are only accelerating this risk. Brute-force attacks have moved from CPUs to high-speed GPUs — some capable of guessing over a million password combinations per second meaning what once took years to crack can now be done in minutes using AI-enhanced tools.

The Dark Side of Passwords: A Cybercrime Economy

The underground market for stolen credentials is vast and lucrative. It’s estimated that over 24.6 billion username-password combinations are currently circulating across cybercriminal marketplaces — although the true scale is difficult to verify due to repeated resale of stolen data.

In bulk, these credentials are even cheaper — as seen in the Booking.com scam, where thousands were sold for just $2,000 with new credentials offered every month, depending on breaches and leaks.

The most valuable logins include banking, email, cloud, crypto, corporate VPNs and social media accounts, which are commonly reused for phishing, identity theft, malware campaigns, and business email compromise.

Behind these thefts are some of the world’s most sophisticated threat groups, including Kimsuky (North Korea), MuddyWater (Iran), and APT28/29 (Russia) — often using malware like Lumma and MaaS platforms, targeting MFA tokens and crypto wallets, spreading over Telegram bots, that make infostealing scalable and profitable. It was reported that in 2024 alone, 3.9 billion credentials were compromised via malware infections across 4.3 million devices.

Even multi-factor authentication (MFA), while crucial, is being challenged by tools like EvilProxy, which can intercept MFA tokens.

This growing cybercrime economy is not just a technical threat — it’s a geopolitical and economic ecosystem as these threats now can come from anywhere at all thanks to MaaS and Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) platforms.

Together with infostealer-as-a-service and phishing kits for hire, these attacks are no longer limited to state actors — they’re available to anyone with a Bitcoin wallet.

The Rise of Passwordless Authentication

In contrast, passwordless security is becoming not only possible — it’s practical. Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Shopify are rolling out Passkeys — encrypted cryptographic keys tied to biometric or device-based authentication.

Microsoft wants its more than one billion users to stop using passwords to log into their Microsoft accounts while Gartner predicts that 60% of enterprises will eliminate passwords for most use cases by 2025.

In sectors like finance, healthcare, and government, hardware tokens, multi-factor logins, and biometric identification are taking over.

Even in countries like Singapore and India, government-backed digital identity systems are accelerating passwordless adoption for banking, insurance, and healthcare access. This is driven by a desire to enhance security, improve user experience, and streamline digital interactions.

In Singapore for instance, Singapore’s National Digital Identity (NDI) system built on Singpass, connects over 700 government agencies and private businesses.

Options like facial recognition, digital ID cards, and QR codes confirm user identities quickly and are more secure than traditional passwords.

India’s Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric system supports secure digital identity verification via OTPs and biometrics, while Australia’s Digital ID roadmap is investing in federated, passwordless frameworks

Behavioural Resistance: Why We Still Cling to Passwords

Despite security advances, people still trust what they know — and passwords feel familiar. But that familiarity comes at a price. Passwords are easily guessed, forgotten, shared, or stolen.

Check Point notes that poor password hygiene — such as reusing passwords, writing them down, or using personal data — continues to be a major weak link in corporate and personal security.

Even worse, phishing attacks — many AI-generated — continue to steal login credentials at scale, despite the presence of two-factor authentication (2FA). The rise in AI-powered phishing and deepfake attacks only makes password-based systems more vulnerable.

Risks of Staying with Passwords in a Post-AI World

The evolution of AI is making password-based authentication obsolete:

• Deep learning models are trained on billions of leaked passwords and can predict common patterns faster than ever.
• Voice- and video-based impersonation attacks using deepfakes can bypass even multi-factor authentication if based on weak identity layers.
• Cloud-based GPUs are democratising the power to break passwords at scale, enabling ransomware groups and script kiddies alike to compromise systems rapidly.

In short: the longer we wait to go passwordless, the more we expose ourselves.

What Organisations Should Do Now

• Pilot passwordless systems using biometrics, tokens, or Passkeys.
• Use tools like Check Point Harmony to prevent password reuse and phishing.
• Enforce Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions and Zero Trust architectures.
• Educate teams not just on stronger passwords — but on phasing them out altogether.

Check Point emphasises password length, diversity, and uniqueness but is also aligned with the need to explore post-password approaches.

World Password Day shouldn’t just be about creating stronger passwords. It should be a prompt to imagine a future without them.

The tools exist. The threats demand it. The only thing missing is our willingness to let go.

Nazia Pillay, head of Partner Ecosystem for MEA South at SAP, says the growth is fuelled by a growing need among African organisations to improve decision-making and bring greater transparency and efficiency to core business processes.

“The future belongs to data-driven organisations that can maximise the value of their business data by leveraging insights that reveal new efficiencies and revenue opportunities. Organisations throughout the African continent are expanding their use of cloud and data solutions, paving the way for the accelerated adoption of AI and other future-ready technologies,” said Pillay.

Investment into cloud technologies is forecast to increase sharply over the next few years, with demand for cloud services growing by 25-30% according to some estimates.

In South Africa, a recent report predicted that the country’s cloud market could surge to more than $6-billion by 2028, tripling in value from $2-billion in 2023.

Optimising ROI ‘an ongoing challenge’

However, says, Ignatius Richards, Business Manager: Financial Planning & Analysis at Decision Inc, many organisations still grapple with understanding the true cost of ownership – and return on investment – of their cloud implementations.

Richards said:

“Scalability and flexibility are among the top benefits companies seek to unlock when they shift their business processes into cloud environments. But this is dependent on reliable infrastructure. Many companies face significant challenges with forecasting the return on investment of their cloud strategies due to fluctuations in infrastructure quality and network capacity, as well as challenges with unlocking the true value of their business data. “

To develop a clear picture of ROI and ensure the business enjoys optimal benefits from cloud and data investments, Pillay recommends that companies prioritise a unified data ecosystem, close collaboration with trusted partners, and the adoption of the latest technologies.

“Companies need new strategies to succeed in a world rapidly reshaped by technologies such as cloud and AI. By laying the groundwork now and adopting new processes and best practices, African organisations can establish a powerful foundation for future innovation and growth.”

Strategy 1 – Build a unified data ecosystem

Richards notes that organisations are generating data at an unprecedented rate, but often from fragmented sources instead of a unified data repository. This is driving the need for technology-led capabilities that turn that data into insights and competitive advantage.

“With data originating from numerous disparate sources, it is crucial to establish an open ecosystem that allows seamless consolidation into a single data repository, ensuring a unified version of the truth. Within this framework, data must be enriched and transformed into actionable insights that are accessible at all levels of the organisation to enable improved decision-making.”

Pillay notes that organisations are increasingly leveraging technology platforms that bring data and analytics, AI, automation and integration together in a single unified environment.

“Organisations leverage SAP Business Technology Platform to innovate faster within the context of their own business, connecting people with data insights to improve decision-making at all levels. But it is all underpinned and dependent on a unified data ecosystem that can deliver insights based on a single source of truth.”

Richards adds:

“Utilising a modern data platform like SAP Business Technology Platform to its fullest potential can unlock innovative methods for data processing, automate business processes, and accelerate the use of generative AI to enhance customer experiences.”

Strategy 2 – Leverage vendor, partner expertise

Digital transformation is in a phase of accelerated growth in Africa, with the market expected to grow from $22.67-billion in 2024 to over $45-billion by 2029 as more organisations seek to streamline their operations and enhance their customer value propositions.

“Given the multitude of options available in the market, selecting the appropriate data and information landscape technology can be a daunting task,” says Richards. “Many of the concerns around cloud adoption – including cost implications – require a certain level of expertise from technology vendors to ensure companies can overcome challenges in their cloud adoption.”

Pillay advises that organisations work closely with technology providers and implementation partners to develop a full understanding of cost implications.

“By adopting an approach of ongoing improvement and refinement through continuous value engineering, companies are better positioned to adapt their technology and business strategies to derive optimal value from cloud and data investments.”

She adds that close collaboration with technology partners can deliver continuous value improvements over extended periods of time. “Companies benefit from vendor and partner input through the adoption of best practices, sharing of latest insights regarding the impact of new technologies, and access to new releases of core systems and applications. This ensures companies operate on the most powerful and advanced versions of cloud and data solutions, driving improved business outcomes.”

Strategy 3 – Deploy advanced technologies

In the era of hyperconnectivity, companies need to look beyond basic adoption of cloud and data solutions to the strategic deployment of advanced technologies.

Pillay notes that artificial intelligence is an obvious candidate when companies seek to deploy advanced technologies to derive business value from cloud and data investments. “AI, real-time analytics and automation unlock the full potential of cloud infrastructure, enabling businesses to enhance decision-making, streamline operations, and drive measurable value from their data assets.”

Richards adds:

“The SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) enables organisations to automate business processes, enhance user experiences, and generate new revenue streams through data utilisation, all while maintaining a clean and optimised core system. This platform integrates various technologies, including workflow management, robotic process automation, and advanced analytics, to drive efficiency, innovation, and agility in business operations.”

Pillay also notes the impact of initiatives that accelerate the deployment of cloud-based ERP solutions as a viable option for companies seeking to accelerate the value of their cloud and data solutions.

“Solutions like SAP S/4HANA Cloud help companies future-proof their business models by running core business processes in an agile operating model. This enables continuous innovation, driving substantial ROI over the short and long term.”

Lodged in the Competition Appeal Tribunal, the lawsuit accuses the tech giant of overcharging businesses for Windows Server licenses when they were using rival cloud platforms like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud. 

The suit alleges that customers using these competitors were forced to pay higher fees for Microsoft’s software than those using Microsoft’s own Azure cloud services.

This lawsuit adds to the issues surrounding the cloud computing market, particularly the pricing of tech giants like Microsoft. Recent developments have seen the U.S. Federal Trade Commission launch an antitrust investigation into Microsoft’s software and cloud computing divisions. 

Similarly, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been investigating the cloud services market, with a particular focus on Amazon and Microsoft. 

The CMA’s investigation, which follows a referral from the communications regulator Ofcom, is still ongoing, with no final report expected until next year.

In Europe, Microsoft has already had some settlements over similar accusations. In July 2023, the company reached a €20 million settlement with the cloud services trade association CISPE, resolving an antitrust complaint filed by the EU. 

This settlement, though smaller in comparison to the £1 billion sought in the UK lawsuit, has likely led to further litigation, as financial settlements often attract the attention of legal funders.

The UK lawsuit is being funded by Litigation Capital Management (LCM), a global dispute finance provider, and is spearheaded by Dr Maria Luisa Stasi, an expert in competition law. 

Dr Stasi claims that Microsoft’s actions are designed to push UK businesses towards its Azure platform, stifling competition by penalising customers using other cloud services. 

According to her, the lawsuit will demand Microsoft disclose the extent of the overcharging and seek compensation for businesses that were allegedly harmed by these practices.

The legal proceedings are expected to include thousands of UK-based businesses that are automatically included in the suit unless they choose to opt-out. 

No upfront costs are required from these businesses, and they stand to gain compensation if the lawsuit succeeds. Microsoft has yet to respond to the allegations.

These enterprises have plenty of data assets to work with, but most of them remain closed off, or locked, in siloed systems. 

According to Google Cloud’s 2024 Data and AI Trends report, 66% of organizations say at least half of their enterprise data is unused. 

Bridging this gap is California-based ApertureData, which has now closed its oversubscribed seed round at $8.25M for a purpose-built database for multimodal AI.

The funding round was led by TQ Ventures with participation from Westwave Capital, Interwoven Ventures, and a group of high-calibre angel investors. Existing investors also reaffirmed their commitment to ApertureData’s vision.

Currently, enterprises must use multiple disparate solutions to mobilize large multimodal datasets (images, videos, text files) for advanced AI.

This involves ingesting data from different sources and storing it in cloud buckets – with continuously evolving metadata in files or databases – and writing bespoke scripts to search, fetch, and maybe do some preprocessing on the information. 

Vector search and classification further complicate the setup, leaving teams struggling with significant integration and management tasks.

As a result, organizations suffer from inefficiencies, the value of AI solutions comes into question, and projects run for months without the expected RoI, leading to missed business opportunities.

ApertureData is bridging a crucial gap in today’s data infrastructure by offering a purpose-built database that provides teams with a unified solution for managing and accessing complex multimodal datasets—perfectly tailored to meet the demands of AI workflows. 

Users can now unlock the full power of ApertureDB in the cloud with a risk-free 30-day trial. In just a few clicks, they can access advanced graph-vector database capabilities, and effortlessly scale their AI applications while eliminating the complexities of data infrastructure management.

ApertureDB provides enterprises with a single interface that centralizes all relevant datasets – including large images, videos, documents, embeddings, and associated metadata – for efficient retrieval and query handling. It stores the data, giving a uniform view of the schema to the users, and then provides knowledge and vector search capabilities for use across the AI pipeline. 

By streamlining these disparate processes through one database, ApertureData reduces the time data scientists spend on data infrastructure issues and accelerates their projects’ timelines from months to a few days. 

Specifically, ApertureDB is 35x faster than existing disparate solutions at mobilizing multimodal datasets and 2-4x faster than other open-source vector databases.

The company was founded by Vishakha Gupta (CEO) and Luis Remis (CTO), who collectively bring over a decade of experience from Intel Labs. Their firsthand experience with the complexities of visual data management led to the creation of ApertureDB.

Vishakha Gupta, CEO of ApertureData commented: “The increasing adoption of multimodal data in powering advanced AI experiences, including multimodal chatbots and computer vision systems, has created a significant market opportunity. As more companies look to leverage multimodality, the demand for efficient management solutions like ApertureDB is expected to grow.”

The company has already secured initial deployments with select Fortune 100 customers, including a major retailer in home furnishings, a large manufacturer, some Biotech, retail, and emerging Generative AI startups.

Andrew Marks, general partner at TQ Ventures added: “ApertureData has steadily built an amazing business with a wide view on the tech stack. They knew early on that traditional databases, which are geared toward textual data, would be insufficient for managing more complex multimodal data. The quantum of multimodal data and the desire to leverage it for analysis and machine learning is likely to explode over the coming decade as we are already seeing with the growth in use cases for generative and multimodal AI. And so, the work ApertureData is doing today will be foundational towards building the best infrastructure for emerging multimodal AI applications across various industries.”

With this new funding, ApertureData plans to scale its production deployments, enhance user experience through improved documentation and sandbox environments, focus on ecosystem integrations, and significantly expand its sales and marketing efforts. 

The company is set to lead the charge in providing a robust, scalable database for the next generation of AI innovations, even as large-scale multimodal data continues to play an increasingly vital role in AI and machine learning.

ICC Conference is a significant annual event that brings together thought leaders, industry experts, professionals, and stakeholders in the fields of cybersecurity and cloud computing.

The conference serves as a platform for the exchange of knowledge, ideas, and experiences, aimed at addressing pressing issues and challenges within these sectors.

The ICC Conference focuses on a specific theme each year, reflecting the evolving landscape of cybersecurity and cloud computing.

This year’s theme is “Collaboration for Cyber Defense: Building Stronger Cybersecurity Ecosystems in Africa”.

The conference attracts a diverse audience that typically includes professionals from IT, finance, healthcare, telecommunications, government, and other sectors.

Speaking ahead of the conference, Aderonke Adeyegbe, CEO of Comercio Limited., said that this diversity enriches discussions and provides a holistic perspective on the challenges and solutions.

The event, ICC Conference, features keynote speakers, panel discussions, and technical presentations that offer insights into the latest trends, strategies, and best practices in cybersecurity and cloud computing.

These sessions help attendees stay up to date with industry developments.

Registration link is here.

Amazon Web Services launched its cloud services in 2006, followed shortly by Microsoft’s Azure offering in 2010.

Three years later, the word ‘hyperscaler’ entered our lexicon – meaning large cloud service providers that can provide offerings such as computing and storage at enterprise scale – and #CloudFirst became the buzzword amongst everyone, from developer to CISO.

Systems integrators were unsure how to measure the potential threat of cloud business, compared to traditional hardware and infrastructure sales. However, the groundswell of cloud adoption was not to be ignored, despite raising so many questions.

Business benefits and costs under the spotlight

One of the biggest shifts in executive think-tanks centred around ICT results versus business outcomes.

Spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic, cost-saving efforts were being applied at all levels of the business, and ICT – known for its ever-increasing price/performance indexes – was put under the spotlight as an easy target for cost saving.

The question being asked was how a cloud-first strategy would align to business outcomes: was this a pure-play in technological evolution, which would only benefit the new economy – the Ubers and Airbnbs of this world? And would the cost of modernising mainstream businesses into a cloud-first era outweigh the benefit?

Early results posed questions

After witnessing the mass-migration of numerous large customer workloads, the first rounds of feedback were not as euphoric as the technologists had hoped for. More questions were raised, and yet another word entered our vocabulary: ‘bill-shock’.

Compliance officers also raised concerns over the sovereignty of company data. Patient records, student marks, financial information and intellectual property… where exactly was all of this data being hosted? And why do organisations have to pay to retrieve their own records?

As the dust settled, customers began moving some workloads back, in an attempt to regain control, both financially and in terms of compliance. A serious re-think of the cloud-first strategy was required.

Dollar-based billing resulted in IT budgets experiencing unprecedented cost increases, without realising any associated operational benefit.

The cost of extracting data, as well as the compliance issues around data sovereignty, rapidly led to a new approach. Given that almost all of an organisation’s records – customer, supplier, product and financial records, applying to entities both large and small – now lived as data somewhere, it became paramount to place data at the centre of such a strategy.

And so, the #DataFirst concept was born.

New solutions, better results: ‘Data First’

A healthy data-first approach results in a strategy that supports the fundamentals of where data is hosted, how it is transported, and how it is secured.

These underlying principles must be supported by a 360-degree approach, encompassing assessment, implementation, support, modernisation and continued gap analysis to assess the strategy’s execution progress. Ultimately, a data-first strategy is aligned to business outcomes and outperforms a pure ICT strategy.

Systems integrators started building smaller private/public clouds, hosted in sustainable data centres where power is guaranteed, with easily accessible sub-millisecond onramp paths and high levels of physical and cybersecurity, while addressing Rand-based billing and locally-based data sovereignty.

These clouds offer organisations Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as well as Platform as a Service (PaaS) options, which often mean a happy home for many applications that are not hyperscaler native.

With multiple availability zones, users of these services address their disaster recovery needs and can start to realise large-scale, long-term savings compared to their pure hyperscaler or on-premises deployments.

Systems integrators and cloud providers tend to concentrate top skills in these areas, thereby providing their customers with innovation, strategy, financial modelling and managed services all year long, while the customer can focus on their core business.

Multi-cloud adoption between different providers has proven to be both cost-effective and risk averse, now that multi-cloud management tools are readily available – even ‘as a Service’ – simplifying cost management, reporting engines, and optimisation efforts. Tools ensure that business outcomes are enhanced and realised.

As to the question “do we need another cloud”, the answer is therefore a resounding “yes!” – and there will be many more clouds to follow, almost moving into the boutique-genre of clouds designed for specific classes of workloads.

Zoho, a leading provider of cloud-based business software solutions, has inaugurated its new office in Nairobi, Kenya. The company, known for its suite of online productivity and collaboration applications, has expanded its presence in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region with the addition of the Kenyan office.

The primary objective of the Nairobi office is to provide training and support services to Zoho customers in Kenya. While other global tech corporations often utilize local offices for product development, Zoho’s facility in Kenya will not be involved in such activities. Instead, it will serve as a training center and offer localized assistance to businesses using Zoho products.

Veerakumar Natarajan, the Country Head for Kenya at Zoho Corp, expressed the company’s commitment to serving small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and its readiness to cater to the needs of larger organizations.

The Nairobi office will enhance Zoho’s account management capabilities and enable them to better address the specific requirements of larger enterprises.

In line with their dedication to supporting SMEs, Zoho has partnered with the Institute for Small Business Initiatives (ISBI) at Strathmore Business School.

Through this collaboration, Zoho aims to digitize local SMEs by providing them with enterprise technology solutions. SMEs associated with ISBI will have access to Zoho One, a unified platform offering various business applications for CRM, finance, HR, project management, collaboration, marketing, and sales.

This will empower SMEs to streamline their operations, automate processes, and manage their activities from a single console. Additionally, SMEs in Nairobi will receive technical support and product training to optimize the benefits of this partnership.

Zoho plans to target sales opportunities with Savings and Credit Cooperative Organizations (Saccos) and real estate agencies. The company has also established key partnerships with notable organizations like ICEA Lion (an insurance firm) and Hotpoint (an e-commerce platform).

The opening of the Zoho office coincided with the partnership announcement with ISBI, a renowned institution that has been assisting SMEs in Kenya for the past eight years.

By digitizing SMEs and providing them with effective management tools, Zoho and ISBI aim to foster growth, streamline operations, and enhance competitiveness within the SME sector.

Zoho’s entry into the Kenyan market demonstrates its commitment to empowering businesses of all sizes by equipping them with robust and user-friendly software solutions.

This was one of the most significant findings of the final results of the Cloud in Africa 2023 study released today by World Wide Worx, with support from F5, Red Hat, Dell Technologies, Intel and VMware.

The study, based on interviews with 400 information technology decision makers in medium and large organisations across Africa, found that 63% of respondents across the continent had experienced an extremely positive impact on customer experience as a result of cloud computing. In South Africa and Kenya, that number jumped to 71%.

The two countries also shared a high impact on business growth: 51% of South African companies and 46% of those in Kenya reported strong business growth following migration to the cloud.

However, a gulf opened between the two countries when it came to the impact of cloud on innovation. In South Africa, 65% of respondents reported a high impact on innovation, while the proportion dropped to 36% in Kenya.

“Companies often move to the cloud seeking quick wins in the form of improved business efficiency or enhanced customer experience,” says Dion Harvey, Regional General Manager of Red Hat Sub Saharan Africa. “However, what we tend to see at Red Hat is that true value in the form of real innovation and impact on strategic goals is only realised once they have matured their thinking and approach to cloud.”

Asked what they saw as the biggest benefits of cloud computing in general, companies identified what World Wide Worx CEO Arthur Goldstuck, principal analyst on the research project, calls the cloud’s “golden quartet”: improved security, better customer experience, business efficiency and saleability.

However, the benefits were not equally distributed. Fewer than half of South African companies, 47%, reported security as a major benefit, compared to an average of 59%. The figure leaped to 78% in Ghana and 63% in Kenya. On the other hand, South Africa led the way in seeing scalability as a benefit, at 47%, compared to an average of 41%. Nigerian companies reflected the lowest response in this regard, at only 29%.

Alain Tshal, district manager of F5 for Sub-Saharan Africa, says that these results underline the extent to which the cloud is not a one-size-fits-all proposition in Africa.

“Every country is at a different level of maturity, and that has a major impact on both immediate benefits of migration and long-term benefits of use. South Africa has had the most extensive investment in hyperscale data centres over the past five years of any country in Africa, so it is no surprise to see that it has very different characteristics to most other markets.”

At the same time, where companies have accelerated their investment  in cloud computing, the impact is immediately apparent, says Goldstuck.

“The latest findings show that Kenya had the strongest growth in cloud computing in 2022, with a huge 84% of respondents reporting increased spend, compared to an average of 62%,” he says. “South Africa saw 55% of companies increasing their spend. That is partly a consequence of spending already having been high in previous years, compared to countries like Kenya.”

Companies from Malawi, Zambia and Botswana all reported a higher level of increased spend, while Nigeria and Ghana came in just below South Africa.

Expectations for 2023 flip around, however. While an overall average of 68% of companies expect to increase spending on cloud services this year, that jumps above 80% for Botswana and above 70% for South African and Nigeria.

In contrast, Kenya drops to the bottom of the list this year, with 51% of companies reporting they will increase their spend.

=======

Moving to the cloud certainly makes sense from an African business perspective, despite some serious challenges and risk factors unique to these shores. However, not all businesses can take the plunge.

Some businesses are reliant on expensive legacy systems that work well for them, while others are dissuaded from the move because of budgetary and compliance concerns.

Luckily, a revolution in how cloud computing is approached means businesses not quite ready to migrate to the cloud fully can extract the benefits of being in the cloud while still using their own on-prem systems, which effectively redoubles security efforts and removes legislative compliance headaches.

Before we get there, let’s take a look at the context in Africa generally and South Africa specifically.

Until the last few years there hasn’t been a great deal of infrastructure investment on these shores by the key cloud players. While we have seen this change recently with substantial Microsoft and Amazon Web Services investments, we are also seeing the uptake of other providers such as Snowflake and MogoDB Atlas, which offer more cost-effective cloud-based solutions.

There’s little denying that the time has arrived for Africa to be a global player and not just a consumer.

Challenges make this difficult, and closer to home any business can attest to the pain caused by our unreliable energy grid. During load shedding, and the sometimes-unplanned outages that follow the power cuts as a result of poor infrastructure, communications often grind to a halt and technology becomes unavailable.

An enterprise business which runs on-prem solutions needs to invest in hardware as well as a connectivity solution.

This entire setup runs on power and so now there is an extra investment needed: backup power in the form of generators, solar and batteries and UPS systems, which are all expensive.

Essentially, this means that if a business made an investment in a data centre two years ago, if you factor the need to replace hardware components which have taken a massive wear and tear beating due to persistent power surges as the power supply switches from the utility to another source, as well as the actual power backup system itself, it is fair to say this same business would have to quadruple that investment today to keep going.

If we consider that running an on-prem business requires huge amounts of capital, it should follow that cloud makes business sense. Yet still there is hesitancy and it is important to interrogate the reasons for this.

The cloud can become extremely expensive. By way of analogy, when you move house, you need to go through everything you have accumulated over time, sort through it, pack, change location and integrate it into your new space. This requires a great deal of time – something most businesses don’t have in abundance.

Very few organisations can afford to take time out to sort through, analyse and order its data before moving it to the cloud.

They must remain online, and they must be making real-time data-driven decisions to remain competitive, so they move massive volumes of data to the cloud, which is expensive and if it is unsorted and uncleaned, the exercise is akin to bleeding money.

Cloud technology itself has not yet evolved to a place where one provider can tick all the boxes and provide a full, one-stop shop for every business’s needs. This requires moving to multi-vendor solutions. One vendor may account for 70% of a business’s functionality while the rest is spread elsewhere and so there must be a concerted effort to seek compatibility.

Lastly, a business must understand its data to use its data. As mentioned, businesses have data in a number of different places and so the question must be asked – what is the point of bringing this data into the cloud if there is no use case for it? Businesses simply must be in control of their data.

Beyond these three major stumbling blocks for many businesses, and the risk that load shedding and unreliable energy supply adds to the equation, there are also legislative and trust issues, and a reliance on legacy systems. The second a business puts data into a public space it invokes POPIA. Being POPI compliant is a complex and expensive exercise which adds to business hesitancy to move to the cloud.

POPIA also places strict rules on cross-border movement of information and businesses know they must work with expert counsel to remain compliant.

However, compliance doesn’t end there. If one looks at the cloud infrastructure in South Africa, most use Europe-based data centres and so businesses need to be compliant with basic European law. This is not well-known in South Africa.

Some businesses, especially those in the manufacturing sector, have invested in massive legacy systems which may be outdated and heavy or clunky, but they do the job well for these businesses. Sometimes the financial investment in these systems just doesn’t justify another capital outlay to move to the cloud.

The big picture that we have painted is clear. We have a massive need for cloud computing but a fairly long list of challenges and risks that prevent wholesale uptake. And to be clear, this is not a global problem, this is an African challenge.

Thankfully Qlik has been proactive in cloud computing in Africa and has provided the perfect evolution, or as I prefer to describe it, a revolution: the ability for businesses to unlock the power of the cloud and data processing while staying on-prem.

This is achieved through a number of capabilities, notably a toolset that brings together three different technologies in a single subscription, removing the need for add-ons or extra purchases, it’s agnostic because no single business has one, unified source of data, and Qlik has its own cloud which means that businesses don’t get charged for cloud storage and computing power, which is crucial in a cost-sensitive environment.

Simply put, the use of a tool such as Qlik Forts enables a business to control its security because data stays at its source. It utilises the benefits of the cloud without any data leaving the on-prem systems. In essence, it addresses compatibility, cost, the pursuit of actionable insights from data, compliance and legacy concerns. Don’t be surprised to see more businesses working in a cloud environment within their own native systems as they realise there is another way to leverage the power of the cloud.