Hybrid cloud most pursued strategy for South Africa firms

A new IBM study, conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC), has revealed that the majority of C-suite leaders in South Africa are prioritising the implementation of hybrid cloud strategies.

The survey, commissioned as a result of the growing importance of hybrid cloud for enterprises in the region and the transformational impact that the pandemic has had on businesses, further reveals the stages of adoption that these executives are at, with 32% currently pursuing hybrid cloud strategies, while more than 60% were in the planning phase. 

“It’s evident that hybrid cloud strategies are becoming core to digital transformation journeys and increasingly prioritised to help revolutionise business models,” says Hamilton Ratshefola, general manager of IBM South Africa. 

“IBM is working with its customers in South Africa and across the globe to accelerate their hybrid cloud efforts and prepare them for transformational technologies such as AI. As organisations in South Africa transform their operations, hybrid cloud will continue to be adopted to provide flexibility and efficiencies and improve the bottle line.”

Hybrid cloud adoption benefits for businesses

Flexibility, cost savings, testing and development, and disaster recovery, are among the main reasons for SA executives in prioritising the cloud, with just over half expecting flexibility and significant cost savings from implementing a hybrid cloud strategy, while 58% see the cloud as useful for conducting testing and development before moving their business-critical workloads to a production environment. 

According to Harish Dunakhe, IDC’s research director for software and cloud in Africa, it’s “clear that there is strong awareness of the benefits that organisations can leverage from hybrid cloud” and as this awareness grows, “we expect enterprises to encourage adoption across their organisations to fully benefit from hybrid cloud programs”. 

The hybrid cloud model’s growing prominence stems from its agile architecture, allowing businesses to manage multiple clouds designed to meet current and incremental business requirements, data and workloads in a secured and governed manner. A hybrid cloud landscape may include the combination of one or more on-premise infrastructures, internally managed or outsourced private clouds, public clouds from multiple providers, and even the infrastructure for legacy and most modern IoT and edge systems, all running simultaneously to fuel the digitisation needs of the enterprise.