Cloud Solutions Transforming Africa’s Business Dynamics- Sanni

Oracle Corporation has identified cloud-based technologies are transformational and changing the business climate in Africa.

Mr. Adebayo Sanni, country managing director of Oracle Nigeria, made the remark at this year’s Oracle Day held in Lagos.

During the event organized concurrently in 47 African countries, Sanni said that cloud remains pivotal to changing business dynamics for CEOs and organization faced with the present economic realities.

He reiterated that Cloud is driving digital trends in Africa such as downloads/uploads, web publishing, emails, amongst others, following infrastructural upgrade on the Continent.

The seventeen undersea cables (and four underway), terrestrial transmission networks doubled in the last five years, e-commerce expansions, e-payments, and others, have been made possible by exponential growth in mobility, social networks, Big Data and analytics.   

Meanwhile, the International Data Corporation (IDC’s) prediction that by 2018, at least half of IT spending will be cloud-based, reaching 60% of all IT infrastructure and 60-70% of all software, services, and technology spending by 2020.

To this, Sanni said that companies with clear-path to technological growth and open to cloud adoption will survive the daunting economic situation, competition and retain customers’ loyalty.

He added that Oracle in the past 10 years has focused on re-writing its solutions from on-promise to the cloud, revealing that about 75% companies that remain just on-premise environment are breached, even without their knowledge. 

“Global adoption of Cloud has recorded 61% year on year growth which is a significant increase and shows the dynamics cloud brings to businesses. In Africa, it is still in the early and experimental stage. However, the gains are enormous, from fighting crimes to smart city, smart metering, and eliminating some bottlenecks in the society”. 

“Why should businesses quickly adapt to this infrastructure? Of, course, customers’ expectations have changed. Companies need cloud based solutions to gather data, analyzing them for better service offerings. To get started, you need to identify key business requirements such as reducing costs, mobile interaction with customers; then, align your business and IT strategy. Oracle is always ready to aid companies achieve these needs,” he said

On his part, Mr. Olusoji Adeyemo, principal sales consultant at Oracle Nigeria, said that Oracle cloud is the place to be for both individual and corporate needs.

While outlining three kinds of cloud customers can take advantage of, including private, public and hybrid, he explained that private, for instance, has accompanying self-service, auto scaling, metering, charge back and capacity planning.

On the public cloud, he said, it comes with specialized, shared and standard portfolio, hence the customer either individual or corporate core interest may not be on where the infrastructure is located as long as such customer has service.

However, on the hybrid cloud, Adeyemo said, such customer would like to know where the data is located but on deployment strategy, hybrid has integrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to one premise, functional and PSR test.

In addition, he said that public cloud deployment comes with SaaS extensions, new applications, high On Line Transaction Processing (OLTP), new mobile apps, standalone web apps and Java and database (DB) sand box, while the private cloud comes with sensitive apps, among others.