Grace Ashiru
The tech sector had substantial instability in the second half of 2022. Social media goliaths Twitter and Meta reduced major portions of their workforces,cloud and e-commerce juggernaut Amazon stated it will lose tens of thousands of workers, and even Microsoft experienced its weakest sales increase in five years.
According to Andrew Cruise, general director of Routed, a regional cloud platform provider and VMware expert, “there is pandemonium in the business internationally.”
“A time of significant uncertainty brought on by the Ukraine conflict has impacted global inflation, exchange rates, and risk appetite in general. This comes after the
early epidemic boom, when the IT sector had such rapid expansion that many businesses made substantial investments in new resources, infrastructure, and skills. They have two choices now that growth has slowed down: hold on and wait it out, or shrink.
According to Benjamin Coetzer, director at Routed, the excitement surrounding hyperscale cloud especially has subsided (from providers including Amazon, Azure, and others).
“First of all, businesses are realizing that hyperscale cloud is more suited for development than daily operations. Second, they are beginning to examine their growing bills, which have risen sharply as a result of their cloud needs expanding
and becoming more complex.
It’s interesting to note that things differ slightly in Africa. Google, Alibaba, and BCX have just announced their entrance in South Africa, whereas hyperscalers like Azure and AWS have only recently begun to do so. As well as how many datacenter businesses and IT players have started investing in Africa as a whole,
Coetzer continues, “I was shocked to see how many hyperscalers opted to set up
shop in South Africa virtually overnight.
However, the continent’s inadequate infrastructure and the current economic circumstances call for some prudence.
The demand is great, the money is great, and the infrastructure is great in South Africa, according to Cruise. But when it comes to the cloud, I usually argue that fast, dependable, affordable internet is the one non-negotiable prerequisite for moving enterprise applications onto the cloud (or into the cloud itself).
“Only fiber, and only in South Africa, adequately provides that. The penetration of
fiber is modest in Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia, Kenya, and Nigeria, and it is still very expensive at slow speeds. Nobody else in sub-Saharan Africa possesses the prerequisites necessary for enterprise cloud computing to succeed. Nevertheless, there is still a demand from the public. And I believe that right now, the demand is inappropriate.
Unsettlingly, some hyperscale resellers aren’t telling prospective customers the whole facts, or maybe they’re unaware of the actual situation.
“They’re spreading the same idea over the world, oblivious to the fact that Africa won’t be able to provide unless local infrastructure is improved.
Then there are the expenses to take into account. “I believe that the pricing rises from AWS, Azure, Google, and similar companies over the coming year will surprise many. Major gains are expected, and that’s without taking into account the weak rand.
Coetzer continues, “Those who choose a corporate cloud and don’t want the bells and whistles that developers use will now start getting considerably more value for their money as that gap develops. For instance, since Routed’s founding six years ago, its prices have decreased while those of hyperscalers have continued to rise.
“I’m hoping that helps people make better judgments moving forward,” says Cruise in his closing statement. Many people believe that IT and the cloud are innovative and exciting, but what most people really need and desire from the cloud is for it to be dull. It must always function; there must be no surprises. And enterprise cloud excels at doing just that. There is no issue with the fact that the upcoming year will bring more of the same.
