Despite the promise it brings of more agile and effective IT infrastructures, many South African enterprises are taking a relatively slow and steady approach to shifting their datacentre infrastructures to the cloud. Since these infrastructures represent millions of rands in sunk investment, a number of mid-sized and large companies are reluctant to completely let go of them, whether by opting for the cloud or more traditional datacentre outsourcing options.

“Enterprises have spent a lot of money on their datacentres,” says Gerhard Dreyer, divisional head of infrastructure at pan-African ICT group XON. “For them, it’s an asset and it’s not that easy to break it down and send it into the cloud.” In many cases, there’s a better business case for maintaining the datacentre and treating it as an asset, he adds.