A new IBM study conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC) revealed that 84% of South African C-Suite are either pursuing or planning hybrid cloud strategies. They believe that hybrid cloud strategies are vital to their organization’s future.
According to the study, C-Suite executives in South Africa are prioritising the implementation of hybrid cloud strategies to benefit from flexibility, cost savings, testing and development, as well as disaster recovery.
While the study highlights this growing shift towards the cloud a year on from the initial lockdown which saw businesses of all sizes across the country adopt remote work strategies -further adoption of hybrid cloud strategies are needed to help organisations transform their operations using technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The new study polled over 500 C-Suite executives across 12 industry sectors, including highly regulated industries, such as government, telecommunication and banking, in South Africa, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The survey was commissioned as a result of the growing importance of hybrid cloud for enterprises in the region and the transformational impact that COVID-19 has had on businesses.
Increasing prioritization of hybrid cloud
The IDC study showed the stages of the adoption journey that these executives are at with 32% of these executives currently pursuing hybrid cloud strategies, whilst over 60% were in the planning phase.
C-Suite executives polled in South Africa pointed to their businesses strategic requirements for adopting hybrid cloud over the next 12 months. Just over half of the executives expected flexibility and significant cost savings from implementing a hybrid cloud strategy, while 58 per cent view cloud as useful for conducting testing and development before moving their business-critical workloads to a production environment.
Thirty-seven percent of South African C-Suite executives viewed hybrid cloud as a solution to any potential disaster recovery requirements their businesses may need.
Additionally, the South African executives see hybrid cloud as an important step towards application modernisation or developing cloud native applications. 67% C-Suite executives stated the ease of application deployment in adopting hybrid cloud in their businesses, whilst 41% want to leverage the operational benefits and 67% believe the technology will improve their resource allocation.
Hybrid cloud adoption is key for enterprise digital transformation
“It is evident that hybrid cloud strategies are becoming core to digital transformation journeys and increasingly prioritized in South Africa to help revolutionize business models,” said Hamilton Ratshefola, General Manager of IBM Southern 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 like AI. As organisations in South Africa transform their operations, hybrid cloud will continue to be adopted to provide flexibility and efficiencies and improve the bottom line.”
The hybrid cloud model’s growing prominence stems from its agile architecture, which allows businesses to manage multiple clouds designated 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.
“The IBM study conducted by IDC highlights the evolution of a hybrid cloud ecosystem in which organisations would choose a deployment option (private cloud, public cloud, or on-premise) depending upon the total value of that deployment option. Vendors that offer flexibility to seamlessly operate across multiple clouds will have an edge over others,” said Harish Dunakhe, IDC’s Research Director for Software and Cloud in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa.
“It is clear that there is strong awareness of the benefits that organisations can leverage from hybrid cloud. As the awareness grows, we expect enterprises to encourage adoption across their organizations to fully benefit from hybrid cloud programs.”
Methodology
The study polled over 500 C-Suite Executives across 12 industries in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and South Africa. It was conducted in cooperation with International Data Cooperation (IDC).
