2 Cloud

If you haven’t heard about “the cloud”, you’ve likely been living somewhere far away and without access to a computer for the past ten years, because it’s one of the most important trends happening within the IT space right now.

Thanks to “the cloud”, businesses no longer need to buy, operate and maintain the expensive physical infrastructure (servers, network switches, IT people) required for things like email, payroll, accounting and custom business software any longer, and can simply pay a third-party supplier a much smaller sum for it as and when they use it.

Cloud services are usually paid for according to the level of sophistication the end user requires, as well as the number of staff who need access to it; everything else is the third-party vendor’s problem. That way, running costs drop dramatically without compromising on the amount or quality of work the business is able to deliver.

If anything, procuring services from the cloud enables more work of higher quality, as the complications of owning said IT infrastructure are eliminated entirely and businesses can focus on what they do best – delivering results. It then becomes vital for businesses to maintain a fast and reliable internet connection, as without it those cloud services become wholly inaccessible.

On a literal level, it’s true that “The cloud is just someone else’s computer” – but that’s also the beauty of the setup. You still get to use that computer for your purposes, but if it breaks down it’s not your problem. Abstracting that other person’s computer as a “cloud” is just a fun way to illustrate the concept.

Every single person/organisation/journalist/person on the street we talked to during our research for this article said the same thing: cloud is probably the year’s single biggest trend, and it’s expected to gain even more traction in 2017.

A brief chat we had with Oracle’s Itayi Mandonga sums it up nicely:

“According to IDC, growth continues to be strong for the cloud with a projection of 17% CAGR (compounded annual growth) and $715m US dollar spending for public cloud in 2017 – across Middles east turkey and Africa – with more than $216m US dollars for South Africa (#1 in this region).”

Next: Hybrid Cloud