A report released at the weekend revealed that 44% of Nigerian businesses say they will embrace the Cloud in the coming year, although Nigerian businesses still lag behind, with only 36% of them currently using the Cloud.
Report of a study conducted by World Wide Worx and Cisco shows that the total of businesses using country in Nigeria will increase to 80% by the end of 2014 indicating considerable investment in cloud within next year.
Commenting on the trend during Microsoft Journalist Academy programme held in Lagos, Oluyomi Alarape, datacenter solutions manager, Microsoft West Africa Limited, highlighted that the economy of scale inherent in Cloud Computing drives the IT industry, in particular, to contribute national development, employment generation, and reduction in cost of doing business.
According to him, companies presently spend 45% of their IT budgets on hardware and software solutions, 25% on facilitates, 15% on operations and the remaining 15% on power generation. “These can be reduced up to 30%, 35%, 70% and 90% respectively via the processes of virtualization and Cloud Computing,” he said.
Alarape, advised companies to be weary of the traditional systems of data storage and management which do not only occupy scarce spaces but drain companies’ purses.
Meanwhile, key among the findings include that the rapid adoption of Cloud Computing in Nigeria and other African countries can be found in the growing confidence that IT decision-makers have in the environment. Even where confidence is not high, distrust in Cloud has almost entirely disappeared.
Apparently, World Wide Worx and Cosco found that approximately 17 percent of data center traffic will be fueled by end users accessing clouds for web surfing, video streaming, collaboration and connected devices, all of which contribute to the Internet of Everything, which is the networked connection of people, data, process and things.
The Cloud in Africa: Reality Check 2013 research study1 was conducted among a small but representative sample of senior information technology decision-makers in medium-sized and large companies.
The most significant finding from the study was that, while South Africa currently leads the continent in Cloud uptake, it is about to be overtaken, dramatically, by Nigeria.
“Cloud computing is the next big step in the evolution of computing and the Internet,” said David Meads, Cisco’s Vice President for Africa.
“The broadband revolution sweeping Africa and the continent’s reputation for innovation add up to tremendous appetite for services that will drive this evolution. Looking ahead, the Internet of Everything represents the largest online trend today. As more people, things and devices connect to the Internet in Africa, more data from more places will be introduced across corporate and service provider networks, which will open up new opportunities and increased demand for the Cloud.”
“The fact that no one is expressing doubt about the reliability of the Cloud means that the final pieces of the puzzle are falling into place,” said Arthur Goldstuck, managing director of World Wide Worx.
“People all over the world continue to demand the ability to access personal, business and entertainment content anywhere on any device, and each transaction in a virtualized, cloud environment can cause cascading effects on the network,” said Meads. “Because of this continuing trend, we are seeing huge increases in the amount of cloud traffic globally within, between and beyond data centers over the next four years.”
Other revelations from the study show that in 2013, 50% South African medium and large businesses are using Cloud services; while a slightly lower proportion of about 48% are using the Cloud in Kenya.
While a significant 44% of Nigerian businesses are will to embrace the only 24% of organizations in Kenya and only 16% in South Africa saying they will be taking up Cloud.
The survey showed that 57% of decision-makers across the three countries had high confidence in the security of the Cloud, while a further 34% were neutral – meaning they would wait and see, but were not negatively disposed towards it. Only 1 in 10 respondents did not trust security in the Cloud.
An even higher level of confidence was expressed in the reliability of the Cloud: 73% of respondents across the three countries expressed high confidence, while most of the rest – 25% – were neutral on reliability.
Private Cloud is the most popular in 2013 with 25% or organizations surveyed currently deploying this compared to 13% opting for Hybrid Cloud and only 7% of companies opting for the Public Cloud.
In 2014, this trend is set to continue with 32% of companies opting for the Private Cloud compared to 18% for Hybrid Cloud and 16% for Public Cloud.
The most popular category for cloud use today is storage (28% of companies) followed by SaaS (10% of companies surveyed).