At the beginning of the year, we highlighted how making the move to the Cloud increases flexibility, enables collaboration, reduces risks, cuts costs and promotes scalability.

Today, we want to give you a Cloud Computing update.

A study from the International Data Corporation (IDC) recently revealed that Cloud migration is very much on the radar of the majority of South African companies. They’re either migrating now, or they plan to do so in the very near future. This IDC study showed that 93% of South African companies are developing a Cloud strategy and are either in the implementation or implementation-planning phase of their Cloud journey.

“The majority of companies have virtualised and a lot of companies have already moved into the Cloud, and have Cloud plans. Only about 7% of companies have done nothing towards moving to the Cloud,” said Mark Walker, associate VP sub-Saharan Africa at the recent IDC CIO Summit hosted in Johannesburg at the beginning of May.

Why are some SA companies lagging behind?

Jon Tullett, research manager for IT services at IDC SA, believes that some South African businesses have been slow to adopt Cloud due to a lack of local infrastructure, data protection concerns and conservative investment strategies.

But this is set to change. The IDC forecasts that at least one major global cloud provider will establish local data centre infrastructure to service the region in 2017.

“This will address key concerns and spur competition and adoption while putting pressure on local providers. New public cloud spend will overtake on-premise in areas such as collaborative applications, application development software and platforms, and customer relationship management (CRM),” says Tullett.

While private cloud should remain an investment priority, Tullett believes that local businesses should still be working to develop the capabilities required to move workloads into the public Cloud if/when the need arises.

At Nebula, we rely on the Cloud to provide our customers with a telecoms expense and lifecycle management solution that offers access to real-time telecoms data and provides seamless integration with existing business applications. Without Cloud, this level of availability, flexibility and reliability simply wouldn’t be possible.