In Africa, 50% of businesses have already adopted the cloud in most of their operations
March 4th 2024
Half of African companies have already adopted the cloud in all or most of their operations, and 61% of them plan to migrate all of their digital assets to this flexible and scalable technology over the next two years. according to a report published this February by the auditing and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
Entitled “Africa Cloud Business Survey 2023 – Unlocking the transformational power of cloud in Africa” , the report is based on a survey of 154 African business leaders as part of the survey of 2,209 executives in the EMEA region. (Europe, Middle East and Africa).
In detail, 12% of African companies have made a total migration (data, services, applications and various IT resources) to the cloud while 38% have adopted the technology in most of their operations.
32% of businesses operating in Africa have also started moving some of their operations to the cloud, and 19% are exploring it.
On the continent, a good number of companies are already going beyond the “lift and shift” approach, which consists of moving an application and associated data to a cloud platform without overhauling the application. Also called “rehosting,” this approach presents a way for businesses to protect their investments in workflow, logic, and business data confined to on-premises hardware. Indeed, more than 40% of companies operating on the continent focus on a combination of migration, application modernization and the development of “cloud-native” applications to accelerate the creation of new specific applications, to optimize the old ones and connect them to each other.
Around 90% of African business leaders surveyed also say they are already deriving measurable value from the cloud, and expect to continue to do so over the next twelve months.
Given the already visible dividends from technology, more than 80% of African companies that have already fully or partially migrated to the cloud plan to increase their investments in this area. In this context, the five priority areas for investment in the cloud concern customer experience (CRM, digital customer portals, applications, Chat Bots); the launch of new digital products and services; defining a cloud strategy; digitalization of the supply chain; and the transformation of industrial processes and financial management (modernization of ERP systems and integrated management software packages).
The main factors driving cloud adoption by African businesses are increasing productivity (49%), improving profitability (48%), reducing costs (43%), strengthening shareholder confidence (38%) and improving the customer experience (37%).
The report also reveals that the main obstacles to cloud adoption cited by the African business leaders surveyed are budgetary constraints (39%), lack of quality cloud service providers (39%), challenges related to cybersecurity and protection of critical data, limited technological capabilities (32%) and skills shortages (26%).
Source: Agency EcoFin
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