Back-up apps rank top as African enterprises plan huge cloud investment

Research from World Wide Worx, has revealed that over 75 per cent of organizations in Africa are using the cloud largely for back-ups.
World Wide Worx in its Cloud in Africa 2023 research study, noted that aside back-ups, there are 70per cent customer service and support applications in the cloud; 35.1 per cent training and human resource apps; 34.3 per cent operational and logistics apps; marketing apps 31.8 per cent; finance and accounting apps 28 per cent; legal apps 21.9 per cent and oathers 2.3 per cent.

World Wide Worx Chief Executive Officer, Arthur Goldstuck, said back-ups are the classic purpose of the cloud going back to its beginnings, and certainly the beginnings of its uptake across the African continent.
“What we’re seeing globally along with the multi-cloud strategy is also a strategy of combining multi-cloud with on-premise, both for purposes of efficiency, and for security … By 2026, we can expect that the cloud landscape across major African markets will look very similar to the global landscape,” he added.

Meanwhile, the majority of African enterprises are planning to increase investment in cloud services in 2023.

According to World WideWorx, around 69 per cent of those surveyed said they would increase spending in 2023, while 24.3 per cent said they would keep spending the same and 6.7 per cent were planning to decrease cloud spending.

The trend of investment in cloud continued from 2022, when 61 per cent of enterprises increased their cloud spend, 36.2 per cent kept investment level and 2.7 per cent decreased spending.
“I think what you’re seeing is that during the pandemic, the increased investment in the cloud was all about business continuity. But as a result of that investment, most companies saw massive benefits in business growth, innovation, and in particular, improved customer service. That has encouraged them to invest even further,” explained Goldstuck.

He added: “When you are spending money on a particular strategy and that strategy is paying off at such a high level, you’re going to spend more money on that kind of strategy, you’re not going to pull back. So, I think what we’re seeing is that success is feeding on itself.”

On those deciding to invest less, he said those were likely enterprises that had invested heavily when the pandemic hit, and were now pulling in the reins because they felt the demands for the company on cloud platforms had diminished.

The study was conducted with the support of Dell Technologies, VMware, Intel, F5 and Red Hat and surveyed small, medium and large enterprises across eight African countries, including the key markets of South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.

Speaking on the maturing market, Goldstuck said: “We’ve seen pervasive cloud adoption across Africa in the last few years, from 2015 to today. As we’ve conducted the research every two years, we’ve seen intensification to the extent that it’s almost unanimous in terms of cloud adoption. But what’s not unanimous or pervasive is mature strategies in the use of the cloud.”

He noted that two years ago 100 per cent of companies said they were using the cloud, but in 2023 this dropped to98.8 per cent of companies.

“That 1.2 per cent (not using the cloud) represents a small number of companies that would have stopped using the cloud, or found the cloud wasn’t working for them, or once they came out of the pandemic, felt they could go back to being purely on-premise,” he said.

Another interesting finding was how many African enterprises are using multiple cloud providers in comparison to global counterparts.

“In Africa, we find roughly 60 per cent of enterprises are using only one cloud provider, which means that just under 40 per cent are multi-cloud users. That is way behind the global average [of over 70 per cent using multi-cloud], which tells us that we are still in an immature cloud adoption environment, it’s still evolving,”Goldstuck explained.