Event Archive
How the cloud evolution is accelerating
The cloud has become a key driver of the global economy, as its evolution shifts from general purpose utility toward highly specialised, intelligent, and distributed ecosystems.
01 April 2026
In recent years, the cloud has evolved significantly, shifting from a technology that offers a flexible infrastructure backbone, to one that has become a genuine driver of innovation. Across Africa, cloud maturity continues to accelerate, despite organisations having to navigate key challenges such as financial pressures and geopolitical
Today, there are numerous organisations seeking to leverage service provider platforms and hyperscale offerings, rather than investing in infrastructure themselves. Such moves are being led by the financial services, telecoms and retail sectors, which are all seeking to become more native in respect of the applications they are running in the cloud, which indicates that, despite the constraints faced around power, cloud adoption is steeply increasing in South Africa.
Hybrid and multi-cloud solutions are definitely on the rise, as an increasing number of organisations are now looking to place relevant applications within the right type of platform, as opposed to simply choosing a single platform and placing all their workloads there.
Even the public sector is getting in on the act and - while uptake is slower in this sector – this is chiefly due to government entities typically being more policy- and procurement-driven, and needing to partner with accredited providers that match their strategy and framework.
It is also worth noting that data sovereignty remains a critical issue across the globe, as this determines who can legally store, process and utilise data. Sovereignty is the reason an increasing number of the larger cloud providers are opening local datacentres in key growth markets, and this is an area where investment can be expected to continue.
Sovereignty and more
Data sovereignty is no longer an abstract policy debate; it is a practical design constraint for organisations moving serious workloads into the cloud. As more customer records, financial data and intellectual property move into hyperscale platforms, organisations need clarity on where data resides, who can access it, and which laws apply.
At the same time, on-premise storage infrastructure, especially all-flash arrays, comes with significant upfront capital requirements, as well as ongoing maintenance, power, cooling and refresh cycles. Cloud allows organisations to scale storage capacity as needed, while increasingly offering region-specific and sovereign cloud options.
Much has recently been made of the concept of local organisations leveraging a homegrown African artificial intelligence (AI), which many believe can deliver better outcomes for the continent, as it can be trained differently, as well as localised from a language perspective.
There can be little doubt that industries that are already leveraging the technology, like banking and agriculture, will benefit enormously from homegrown AI. We should also see an increasing number of locally-based AI datacentre facilities that can support high-density AI loads.
You can’t talk about cloud today without talking about security — the two go hand in hand. Security is no longer just about protecting the data centre environment; it is increasingly about finding and addressing vulnerabilities within applications themselves.
While it should be clear that cloud adoption is on the increase, key to its ongoing success will be data modernisation – how businesses effectively modernise their apps, and how their particular business sector shapes the way they leverage the cloud. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, and the trends outlined above will play their part in shaping how individual verticals continue to develop and leverage the cloud into the future.
