Vaughn Naidoo, Acting Executive: Centre of Excellence, MTN Business

Spending on cloud services is predicted to reach almost $500-billion globally in 2022, with data the unchallenged emperor of business and its most valuable resource, to be mined and protected at all costs. No longer does it sit in a box at our feet as it did 25 years ago at a time when data was centralised. Now it is fragmented into many places and a one-size-fits-all solution is neitheossible nor practical.

The ICT SA Market Share Overview report predicts a R60-billion market opportunity with a focus on five pillars of targeted growth areas: fixed connectivity; unified communications and collaboration (UCC); telemetry and IoT, with IoT pushing a smart and data agenda; cloud; and security. Data and artificial intelligence (AI) require a unique skill set and hence usually cannot be built via a traditional adjacency services. Security usually has a presence in one form or the other in organisations and can be having the ability constructed using internal security capabilities.