South Africa is one of the fastest-growing IT markets globally, finishing fourth overall in 2020, according to Gartner. And a significant part of that momentum stems from cloud adoption; numerous surveys show an overwhelming local preference for hybrid cloud adoption. Microsoft, one of the public cloud vendors, also sees this trend in the market, says Johannes ‘JK’ Kanis, cloud and enterprise business group lead at Microsoft.

“We’ve seen incredible acceleration from customers, both from a digital transformation point of view and from an innovation point of view. Hybrid cloud is here to stay for some time. We see different trends: some customers are driving an aggressive cloud-first strategy and building new innovation in terms of cloud-native applications. But the reality is that many customers have a massive footprint of legacy applications and some of those applications are very difficult to refactor and re-engineer for the cloud. And so, the hybrid footprint is continuing to grow.”