What do you want from your cloud provider?
IT professionals on how they are articulating the value of cloud to the finance department.
01 July 2025
South Africa’s cloud market will grow to around R113bn in 2028, from R35bn in 2023, according to Africa Analysis. Huawei was the first hyperscaler to open a region in South Africa in 2018. It now has three availability zones in the country, and has just opened a zone in Lagos.
Brainstorm: What’s been your experience with the public cloud?
Martina Madali, Group CIO, Arena Holdings, says it has a private cloud and also uses Google Cloud Platform for its digital platforms, such as its websites, apps and content management system.
For Johan Laas, CISO, Rand Refinery, it’s important to find a balance between on-prem and cloud. “We have a lot of on-prem, but we’re busy with an aggressive global expansion, and the cloud will really assist us. But you can’t just move everything to the cloud. In gold refining, you need to have some systems close by, and others can go to the cloud. What’s the optimum mix? And what about cost?
“Everybody moved everything to the cloud, and then they brought it back on-prem. We need to find that sweet balance.”
Mitesh Hira, operations and infrastructure manager, Arena Holdings, says it used to have all its servers on-prem; slowly, it moved to datacentres, first to a facility in Parktown with Internet Solutions, and now to Lynwood in Pretoria, with iOCO. The company now runs around 180 production servers for all its business units.
Ayanda Peta, group head: cybersecurity, African Rainbow Minerals (ARM), has questions around cost. He says most organisations are using a hybrid multicloud approach, and cost has become the differentiator.
Madali wants to know how Huawei is able to compete so aggressively on price.
Calvin Huang, head of cloud solution architecture, Hauwei, says the company manufactures its own hardware and processors for its datacentres, so it can control the cost.
Before the arrival of hyperscalers in South Africa, he says, many local businesses were hosted in datacentres in Europe. Huawei saw the opportunity and opened its first region in Johannesburg in 2018, because “many companies want to keep their data locally,” he says. Its Johannesburg region is a Tier One region, which means it can provide advanced services, such as AI. He says it also offers an e-commerce live streaming service in China, which it hadn’t yet launched in South Africa.
Chinese internet users don’t typically search for a product on an e-commerce platform, he adds. “The platform will give you recommendations based on what you’ve purchased before. If you open the Ecommerce platform, you’ll be able to swipe through short videos. They’re using big data and live streaming to introduce the product to you. People can then interact with the broadcaster. There are a lot of new business models in China, and they’re relying on cloud vendors.”
Steven Chen, MD, Huawei Cloud, says the company spends over 20% of its total revenue on R&D.
Brainstorm: How are you measuring your cloud ROI, and what kind of conversations do you have with your CFO around cloud spend?
Laas says his finance department is “turning the corner”. “They’re still looking at the bottom line. It’s a matter of convincing them. Sometimes there will be higher demand, and you can switch [to the cloud]. You need to have the flexibility to put certain workloads in the cloud.” He says its laboratory systems and evaluation certificates for the mines are in the cloud. “Our CFO is seeing the benefits.”
Peta, from ARM, says it’s not easy to articulate the value to the business of a cost centre such as IT. ARM has done its cloud migration in phases, the first of which identified workloads, such as small applications, that it could move to the cloud. The next phase saw it build a cost optimisation business case to move other workloads. “The cloud is going to be more expensive, but there will be efficiency and productivity gains. It’s not easy to articulate, and people need to experience it,” he adds. He says it now uses Azure, and “a little bit” of Oracle for its ERP.
“The more people understand what we’re [IT] trying to achieve, the better it is. They’re able to realise the value if you explain it to them in business terms. We make the business aware of the benefits of availability, improved efficiencies, which can be difficult to quantify in monetary terms.”
Madali says if she can prove to the CFO that the IT department is helping the business to generate money, “then it becomes an easier conversation”. She’s recently been motivating for more cloud storage for its content. “We need to be able to archive it, and make sure it’s accessible when we need it.” She says while some of its archive is digitised, there is still plenty of work to do, because the company is over a 100 years old.
