Features

Cloud spending is going up. According to ‘PwC’s 2025 Africa Cloud Business Survey’, 88% of organisations on the continent plan to increase their cloud budgets this year, yet many still can’t tell you exactly where that money is going. That’s the paradox of modern cloud economics – the more you spend, the harder it gets to see what you’re actually paying for. At the same time, Africa’s cloud maturity has accelerated. The PwC survey found that over 86% of organisations reported medium or high cloud maturity in 2025, up from 61% just two years earlier. But what this progress reveals is a new set of problems. The challenge is no longer getting into the cloud; it’s figuring out how to stop haemorrhaging money once you’re in. And while the usual cloud spend suspects – idle resources, overprovisioning, shadow IT – are well-documented, the real waste isn’t always the obvious waste. It’s quieter, more structural and often a lot harder to fix.

When you rent compute from a hyperscaler, you’re not getting a bespoke environment. You’re choosing from a menu: small, medium, large. The problem is that most real-world workloads don’t map cleanly onto those options. “If you need more than a small but don’t quite fill a medium, you have to take the medium,” says Marco Vieira, solutions architect at Nutanix. “You’re paying for resources you’re never going to use.” At a small scale, that gap is tolerable. But once you’re running 50, 80 or 100 virtual machines, that wasted capacity on every single instance starts adding up. This is when “micro waste” becomes a serious cost burden.