Chris Erasmus, AWS South Africa

Hyperscale cloud has become an intrinsic part of the digital economy. Whether it’s people browsing the web, making purchases, or businesses managing data storage, hyperscale cloud is embedded in nearly every layer of modern infrastructure. Cloud, it seems, has become a business necessity. A recent McKinsey survey of around 50 African business leaders showed that 45% of their workloads are in public cloud, which is on par or ahead of the rates of adoption in North America and China.

Locally, reports show that South Africa’s cloud market will reach over R113 billion by 2028. All of the big players – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle Cloud and Huawei Cloud – have local availability zones. Alibaba also has a presence, through its partnership with BCX.