Africa Falls Behind in Cloud, Emerging Tech Adoption

Organisations in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are two years behind their global counterparts in their public and private cloud journey, and up to five years behind in the deployment of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence.

This is one of the key findings of the “State of commercial and enterprises in SSA” study conducted by research firm IDC, in collaboration with open source software firm Red Hat.

The resultant report, based on interviews with 305 IT leaders and CIOs from SA, Nigeria and Kenya, provides a landscape of the region’s digital transformation.

The research shows that while SSA is undergoing massive transformation in the adoption of cloud and new technologies, over the past two years, the pandemic has largely resulted in firms placing their digital initiatives on hold, to focus on the rollout of remote working services for their workforce.

While this helped them accelerate the shift to remote working technologies, it resulted in the majority of firms falling years behind global counterparts in their cloud migration endeavours, as well as meeting their vision in the adoption of emerging technologies.

Releasing the research findings at a Red Hat media
conference last week, Johan Scheepers, solution architect leader at Red Hat Africa, noted Africa’s burgeoning data centre industry has led to cloud activity hype on the continent. However, many companies are still at the start of their cloud journey.

This has led to an increased cloud skills gap, leaving firms desperate to fill the growing demand for digital skills.

“While we are seeing more businesses investing in hybrid environment or multi-cloud, there is a significant shortage of cloud skills and software developers in the region, amid a new way of developing new-age applications, including platform-as-a-service, database-as-a-service and data-collection-as-a-service.

“Cloud migration as a specific function scores low in organisations’ investment priorities, and company leaders tell us it’s difficult for them to hire for specific cloud-related roles,” noted Scheepers.