With the Hyperscalers (Google, Huawei, Amazon, Microsoft) all making significant investments by either establishing a presence or announcing the imminent arrival of their Cloud Services to Africa, there has never been a better time for IT managers to think about a move to the cloud.

Whether you are a Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) looking to add resilience and increase performance to your operation, or you are a large corporate looking to unlock savings or to accelerate the IT deployment life-cycle, there are pros and cons to hosting your applications either on site at your premises, off-site but co-located physically or virtually in a third party data centre (Private Cloud), or in the cloud (Public Cloud).

Before any move is considered, a detailed understanding of your current environment is required. Each company is different. Typically, the larger the IT budget, or the older the organisation, the higher the likelihood is of having legacy systems which have not kept pace with the rate of change of technology and  “shadow IT” where the IT department is bypassed altogether for alternate solutions that can be delivered to the organizsation faster.

Investments previously made into infrastructure may no longer be fit for purpose, or you may need to sweat those assets a little longer until the end of their useful lives to avoid costly write-offs. The recent return of load-shedding in South Africa and its associated risks of greater downtime and hardware failure, as well as other external factors namely nationwide shutdowns due to pandemics such as Covid-19 mean that executives need to continually assess their IT strategy and whether they remain relevant for the future.

Download our checklist

12 Things To Consider Before Moving To The Cloud.