Clarion call for creation of African cloud infrastructure

Cloud is recognised as one of the four foundations of the fourth industrial revolution, also called digital transformation, but T-Systems South Africa MD Gert Schoonbee highlights concerns that Africa will be subjected to skills and job losses if a large-scale cloud system cannot be developed on the continent.

He notes that the massive scale of international cloud systems (mainly in Europe and the US) provides a nigh unassailable advantage in terms of economies of scale and, hence, price points.

Schoonbee calls on businesses and governments to consider the development of a “common cloud” in African countries, which will provide sufficient scale to offer competitive prices, functionality and security.

Fierce competition not only among South African companies, but also among companies on the continent makes it difficult to countenance such a call, but he notes that, while cloud enables computing and storage hardware to be located anywhere, the hardware must still exist, along with proportional skills and economic opportunities where it is located.

“My concern is that Africa will be ‘colonised’ by services located in other countries and that skills, services and jobs linked to cloud systems will leave the continent. I call on African businesses and governments to think about a shared or common cloud system to support local economic activities.”

Cloud systems provide significant agility for companies, as they typically use pay-per-use or rental models, and many additional services can be provided within such systems, such as business intelligence, analytics and resource planning systems. Cloud systems also enable companies to reduce the cost of hardware they require and to embrace enterprise mobility.

Cloud systems are expected to continue to grow robustly over the next five to ten years, just like the increasing adoption thereof.

“If we can create a common African cloud infrastructure layer – specifically as an infrastructure-as-a-service model – then we can achieve the necessary scale to bring pressure to bear on these massive cloud services companies to locate some of their systems on the continent or to compete in terms of price, functionality and security with international cloud systems,” explains Schoonbee.

Local cloud systems will provide opportunities for local companies to use them to provide platform-as-a-service offerings and benefit from the capabilities of and demand for such systems. This will also enable companies to compete against one another in terms of services and capabilities in an open, free market.

“Despite increasing partnerships and collaboration among local companies, I don’t know whether we can successfully partner to provide this basic layer of cloud, but my plea is that we do exactly that. My thoughts are premised on long-term business sustainability; we need to collaborate to achieve the volumes that will provide a local abundance of cloud that can serve our businesses.