Esther Munyi, Sasfin

Many in the corporate world will remember mid-March with annoyance as multiple fibre cuts saw Azure service to Africa go dark. Prenesh Padayachee, group chief digital officer, Seacom, remembers how he was sitting in a board meeting with online participants at the time, which ground to a halt. While South Africans experienced intermittent access and a drop-off in speed, no one in Nigeria could access the internet for four days, he says.

The outage shows just how reliant businesses have become on cloud connectivity and cloud services. “Banks are moving everything to the cloud, and other organisations are following a strategy to be cloud-first. But how do you know where your workload is sitting? And how big is that workload that you’re putting in the cloud? How much bandwidth do you need to access the cloud services?” Padayachee asks. Seacom’s network is mostly built with dark fibre, he adds, either that which it owns, or that it rents from other people.