A new study by World Wide Worx, conducted in partnership with F5, Dell Technologies, Digicloud Africa and Intel, has revealed how the Covid-19 pandemic has elevated cloud computing to the front of decision-makers’ minds.

The comprehensive ‘Cloud in Africa 2020’ report maps out the latest cloud trends across the continent, drawing information from decision-makers at over 400 medium-sized and large businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana and Malawi.

Some 91% of respondents described cloud computing as important in helping with businesses’ response to the crisis, with 91% and 82% of those surveyed reporting that the technology platform is used primarily for disaster recovery and remote working respectively, followed by customer service activities at 52%.

Further, 80% of the respondents to the survey, now in its third year, believe that cloud computing has made a significant contribution to governments’ efforts in dealing with the pandemic.

The most common uses by governments were remote working at 69%, public communications at 55% and crisis coordination at 50%, the report shows.

“During this time, historical perceptions of cloud being costly and risky have also largely dissipated,” says World Wide Worx MD and lead analyst on the project Arthur Goldstuck, noting that as many as 84% of respondents now believe cloud computing is cost effective and only 12% regard it as inherently risky.

“Covid-19 has clearly catalysed decision-makers’ receptivity to the cloud in recent months, but a significant momentum was already building across Africa,” he continues.

He believes that the transition to digital channels will likely continue beyond the pandemic as organisations adopt fundamentally different ways of working.

“In many cases, it is prompting different architectural solutions for expansion, such as cloud bursting and augmenting on-premises deployments with virtual appliances.”

The ‘Cloud in Africa 2020’ report shows that 38% of decision-makers increased their cloud services spend last year and over 60% plan to increase their spend next year.

In South Africa, 82% of the respondents said that they had increased cloud spend, followed by 59% in Zimbabwe, and 50% in both Nigeria and Botswana.

Further, cloud investment is also growing as a percentage of overall information technology (IT) budgets, particularly in countries with traditionally less mature IT markets.

In Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, 71%, 59% and 56% respectively of the respondents said that between a quarter and half of their IT budgets are allocated to the cloud.

“In Namibia, 65% said more than half of IT budgets were focused on cloud. In Botswana, 14% reported that 100% of budgets went to cloud-related IT,” Goldstuck highlights.

However, in South Africa, which is the region’s most mature cloud market, 45% of decision-makers indicated that the cloud accounted for less than a quarter of IT budgets, while 34% said it was between a quarter and half and 11% put it at above three-quarters.

Almost two-thirds of all respondents are set to increase investments in cloud services in 2021, with 36% expecting investments to remain at current levels and 1% anticipating a decrease in spend.

“Significantly, more than half of all respondents estimate that over a quarter of applications will have moved to the cloud by the end of this year,” Goldstuck points out.

F5 regional cloud sales manager for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa Samir Sehil highlights Africa’s accelerating purposeful embrace of cloud computing, which will have a profound impact on organisations’ abilities to innovate, create new services and compete on both a regional and global level.

“Across the region, it is also hugely encouraging to see that businesses are starting to tailor cloud infrastructure to their specific needs by using multicloud application services,” he adds, noting that, as cloud- and container-native application architectures mature and scale in Africa, it is expected that far more organisations will deploy related app services both on premises and in the public cloud.

“While there are some regional variations in strategic benefits, 40% of respondents believe that cloud computing has had a direct, positive impact on market share in the past two years,” Goldstuck continues.

More than 60% of those surveyed cite business efficiency as the single biggest benefit, followed by agility and operational flexibility (53%) and improved customer service (45%).

Thirty-seven per cent said that improved time-to-market was also an importance outcome.

“Cloud computing also emerged as a powerful platform for intangible elements of organisations’ internal strategy. Almost two-thirds reported an improvement in cross-organisation innovation, owing to the cloud. Over half also experienced noticeable brand perception improvements,” he notes.

“Typically, businesses have hesitated to digitally transform and adopt the cloud, mainly because change is difficult,” says Digicloud Africa customer engineer Nick Treurnicht.

“Since the pandemic, the will of leaders to change at pace has increased by an order of magnitude. The situation has clearly proved that this type of rapid adaptation is possible and, crucially, that businesses can thrive in the cloud.”

However, the potential for a data breach remains the biggest concern for 63% of respondents.

“The main, and closely related, multicloud challenge in Africa is the need to apply consistent security policies across all applications and their locations,” says Goldstuck.

Nevertheless, as many as 50% claim to be addressing the issue by building cloud security strategies on a per-application basis.

While complexity is usually the biggest barrier to reaping the efficiency benefits offered by the cloud, multicloud does not have to be complex, says Dell Technologies South Africa systems engineering director Greg McDonald.

“The right platform can integrate all the different components and give a clear view of cloud operation. “These can then be scheduled, automated and analysed in real time. More than ever, companies can extend their hybrid cloud systems interfaces easily and get rid of the management complexity,” he concludes.