David Behr, Liquid C2

The fuse has been lit on South Africa’s cloud revolution, long-term investments are being made and the market is starting to heat up. The likes of Microsoft, AWS and Google, Oracle, Alibaba and Huawei have all made commitments to deploy local cloud regions on South African soil. To house their computing equipment, we’ve also seen investments made by a handful of other players into building a host of large, refrigerated datacentre buildings with their own sizeable generators, girthy fibre lines, and the latest physical security.

But it’s not just the mentality of ‘build it and they will come’, the demand for digital services has similarly boomed, especially during the pandemic, as enterprises and consumers have increasingly shifted online. And if you add into the mix the data sovereignty requirements introduced by the local Protection of Personal Information Act (PoPI), it’s fair to say the South African cloud market has built a solid foundation to continue its growth trajectory.