Africa: The Rise of Cloud
Nowadays, the African continent is undoubtedly a synonym for opportunities. It opens an enormous potential and immense space for the IT market’s extensive growth and fast development of technologies.
Digital Development: overlook
The African continent is the land of contrasts: its landscapes vary from the biggest desert on the planet to the most breathtaking waterfalls, lakes and savanna. Social and economic landscapes are no exception. Highly developed technological areas and modern metropolises neighbour poor regions with an impressive lack of infrastructure, the growing contrast is bringing the continent toward a digital revolution. And those who noticed the chances accept the challenges.
Nowadays, the African continent is undoubtedly a synonym for opportunities. It opens an enormous potential and immense space for the IT market’s extensive growth and fast development of technologies. Despite the apparent problems like lack of quality internet connection, modern hardware infrastructure and IT personnel, the cloud perspectives of the African market look tasty, attract big players and incite local IT companies to develop
Recently Google announced its investment of 1bln in the next five years into African IT. The money will be used to support local startups and accelerate the spread of the Internet. Last year AWS launched another cloud region in Cape Town, allowing customers to run applications and store data locally in South Africa. Following the global focus on data sovereignty, laws will soon appear to regulate the IT industry, and modern local data centers will become necessary. Oracle and Orange agreed to bring the cloud to the West and Sub-Saharan Africa regions.
Meanwhile, African authorities are taking some initiative themselves. Smart Africa unites 32 countries in their effort to raise African IT. The project is supported by financial and governmental groups like the World Bank and African Union. The organization aims to spread digital knowledge within the continent and create a “digitally connected Africa” by 2030. The project also aims to specialize countries in different IT areas, e.g. Rwanda is supposed to become a country of smart cities, South Africa will specialize in AI and blockchain, Côte d’Ivoire — in cybersecurity. The initiative definitely has the potential to create new Tech Valleys in Africa.
Challenges: to meet and overcome
In the world of global digitalization, widespread, stable and secure Internet access gives excellent chances to adopt recent technologies and develop IT, Telco, Finance and many other industries faster. It is directly linked to the country’s economy, prosperity and growth.
The telecommunication industry is one of the growth leaders. The key parameters of the African Telco industry show the highest growth rates in the world. However, while the figures are impressive, a stark digital divide remains. An estimated 900 million people are still not connected to the Internet. For the population who is lucky to have Internet access, connectivity prices remain mostly high and unaffordable. Moreover, the bandwidth is severely limited in many areas.
A Senegal study highlights this close relationship between Internet access and general welfare: 3G mobile technology is associated with a 14% growth of consumption and a 10% decline in poverty. However, for the countries that have very limited internet access, such a result means rising inequalities. They are left behind the more prosperous African neighbours and stay apart from the global economy. At the moment, nearly one-quarter of the African population has Internet access. By 2030, the situation will be significantly improved, and the Internet will be available to three-quarters of the population.
All the experts and forecasts confirm the African market capacity is enormous. And it is mindless to deny perspectives it offers. In recent years telecommunications alone have generated 1.7 million jobs and contributed $144 billion to the continent’s economy, which equals 8.5% of the GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa alone.
Crisis Opportunities
It is important to emphasize that all this is happening in the background of the Covid-19 crisis. The pandemic hit the continent’s economy harshly and impacted many industries. For IT, along with new challenges, the situation has also brought great development opportunities.
In South Africa, the market of cloud computing services is increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The local research group of World Wide Worx reports about 82% increase in business spending for cloud technologies and services in 2020.
Today Africa is a continent of contradictions, and the success of cloud technologies in South Africa can not be compared to the IT market in other parts of the continent. The only things that we can talk about are positive tendencies for IT and great future perspectives. The recovery for Africa might be more challenging than for the rest of the world, nevertheless successful if done correctly in terms of economic growth, relying on good internal management, and engaging financial support from wealthy countries and global organizations.
Being a Part of Africa’s Digital Transformation
Africa’s digital development is bringing massive changes in the continent’s welfare, and it won’t take long before it starts to bear fruits. Excellent opportunities should be used. The leading IT companies prefer not to waste time, and they have already become a part of the revolution.
Sardina Systems is more than happy to collaborate with local IT companies and provide the latest cloud technologies to the African enterprise market. Sybyl is Sardina’s reliable partner and FishOS reseller. The company is headquartered in Kenya and also operates in Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Djibouti, Burundi, Somalia and South Sudan. Our multi-year partnership with Sybyl has established the ground for various collaborations with the companies in the East African region. While our product FishOS helps African companies efficiently manage private clouds and scale their businesses, Sardina Systems is pleased to share professional experience and technical knowledge with local companies to support successful cloud adoption.
Being highly interested in cloud market perspectives, Sardina is open to a productive collaboration with IT integrators, data centers, and hosting companies. It welcomes its new customers from Africa, the continent of great contrast and tremendous opportunities.
