Cloud adoption across West Africa remains a net positive as growing demand leads to increased availability of infrastructure and vendors.

Still, there is always the potential for organisations to lose control of their spending, whether it’s because of internal circumstances or ones beyond their control.

No cloud strategy is complete without a cost management system in place, and that system becomes more critical as competition in the region reaches new levels and cloud service providers work to offer the best value proposition to enterprises.

The key to success lies with enterprises taking a more rounded, long-term view of cloud computing, treating it as an ongoing expenditure that requires continuous monitoring and collaboration, backed by new management practices and clarity on what they want the cloud to do for them.

Managing cloud costs with the help of FinOps

Companies move to the cloud for many reasons, but chief among them are the benefits of flexible and scalable IT infrastructure at a higher level of cost efficiency. But that efficiency isn’t always guaranteed.

Mismanagement and a failure to properly migrate to or handle cloud resources can lead to companies overspending.

This can be the result of overprovisioning resources or underutilising them, inflated cloud data transfer and storage costs, cloud misconfigurations, or a lack of governance and oversight.

West African businesses need a cloud model that suits them, whether it’s pay-as-you-go, a fixed monthly or annual subscription, or reserved or spot instances that provide extra flexibility to enterprises and potentially offered with sizable discounts.

At the same time, they can utilise cost control features such as resource tagging, APIs for real-time usage notifications, and AI/ML-powered analysis and forecasting tools that are now readily available.

A big component of cloud cost management is FinOps, which combines finance and DevOps for maximum accountability and oversight.

Cloud environments are inherently complex and so to achieve cost optimisation, all relevant teams need to be hands-on and aware of how budgets are being spent.

FinOps also allows enterprises to more effectively enforce governance and compliance procedures, which in turn inform and shape the financial decisions enterprises need to make.

The hyperscale value proposition

Never before have African businesses had such a level of choice when it comes to cloud service providers. At the same time, hyperscalers have evolved their value offering as the cloud becomes standard practice for businesses, and they themselves become invested in helping businesses achieve their organisational goals.

When selecting a hyperscaler to partner with, businesses in West Africa should consider the following factors:

• Cost: Easily the most important factor, businesses can determine the value offering of hyperscalers based on their committed spend agreements as well as hyperscalers’ effort to expand their capacity, partnerships, and capabilities as a holistic cloud services provider.
• Compatibility: Businesses cannot waste capital and resources having to retrofit their existing applications to be compatible with a new computing environment. By prioritising interoperability as part of the selection process, they can identify which providers can deliver the smoothest migration process.
• Scalability/Agility: Hyperscalers must be able to respond to businesses’ IT needs, scaling systems and allocating resources as needed. This includes handling data transfers efficiently.
• Support: Not every business has the same level of access to cloud skills and expertise, and should therefore be able to turn to their hyperscalers for support.

Hyperscalers have also begun to increase their focus on data sovereignty and residency, addressing concerns related to data protection and compliance, itself a growing concern among African enterprises.

With features such as local availability zones and specialised privacy solutions, enterprises can keep their data where it needs to be and adhere to any relevant data regulations.

Collaboration makes for resilient, cost-effective cloud

Making cost management a part of your enterprise’s cloud migration strategy isn’t difficult, not when it is built into both hyperscalers’ service offerings and the platforms that enterprises today use to build applications and software.

For example, enterprise containerisation software can come equipped with a cost management tool that enables businesses to track their cloud spend and understand the cost of their clusters, either in the public cloud or on-premise.

But more than that, enterprises need to assume a collaborative stance with their cloud and platform vendors, making them a part of the organisation’s journey and digital transformation.

They are invested in your future because it is tied to their own, and it’s through collaboration that enterprises can achieve the best results and build the next generation of cloud-enabled business applications and solutions.

With a predominant focus on 5G RedCap, 5G Massive IoT, and 4G LTE Cat-1bis modules, the forthcoming shipments are anticipated to culminate in a substantial 5,4-billion cellular IoT connections (installed base) by the year 2030.

This paradigm shift underscores the evolving landscape and increasing prominence of advanced cellular connectivity solutions.

The research also found that mass adoption of 5G RedCap is set to commence from 2024 onward with the technology establishing itself as a mid-tier connectivity solution for 5G devices that do not require such high specifications as Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications (uRLLC) and Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB).

It will also enable futureproofing of devices as the industry anticipates the eventual phase-out of 4G beyond the year 2030.

“2024 will be a pivotal year for 5G RedCap growth,” says Alexander Thompson, senior analyst for IoT at Omdia.

“This will begin in China where most volume is expected and, in due course, subsidies will bring the module Average Selling Price (ASP) down to similar pricing as LTE Cat-1.”

The forecast also finds that over 60% of IoT module shipments will come from the Asian & Oceania region, making up approximately 80% of IoT connections in 2023.

Notably, the automotive sector emerges as a key driver and is set to see the largest number of module shipments due to the growing demand for smart vehicles integrating 5G connectivity.

“Across the IoT value chain, Application Enablement Platforms (AEPs) continues to be the Andrew Brown, practice lead for Omdia’s IoT group. “There releading revenue generator,” says mains a role for industry specific/ pure-play AEPs despite the exponential growth of hyperscaler offerings and financial constraints for startups in the current economy.”

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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.