Tag: Internet of Things (IoT)

The pace at which digital transformation has swept across industries continues to increase rapidly in response to COVID-19. There is no doubt that many businesses across all sectors have leapfrogged several years of progress within a matter of months.

Private cloud, public cloud, it doesn’t matter effectively cloud computing combines computing with a broad grid of data communications. Mostly, the grid is supplied by the global internet, provided you have a reliable connection to the internet.

This tumultuous year has placed incredible pressure on people, on relationships and on the global economy. However, one component of the economy has proven its resilience throughout the pandemic and the lockdown: global supply chains.

2020 witnessed a dramatic cyber threat landscape from beginning to end. Although the pandemic played a central role, as the year progressed cyber adversaries evolved attacks with increasingly disruptive outcomes. They maximised the expanded digital attack surface beyond the core network, to target remote work or learning, and the digital supply chain.

The pandemic and the lockdown have reduced our mobility, but our connectedness - via IoT, the Cloud and AI - has helped us overcome this. As society gets moving again, connectedness will redefine the way we do it.

The rollout of 5G in South Africa's urban centres is likely to be one of the most significant technology events of 2021. Where 3G and 4G LTE technology provided increased speeds compared to their predecessors, 5G will establish an entirely new innovation platform upon which many of the technologies and day-to-day conveniences of the future will be built.

Statistics show that companies that are evolving by embracing speed and agility are growing at twice the rate of companies that are struggling to scale innovation.

Although the rise of COVID-19 presented many challenges to our country in the year 2020, it stimulated the growth of technological innovations that we can build on to the effects on how we do business, how we trade, how we work, how we produce goods, how we learn, how we seek medical services and how we entertain ourselves in 2021.

In the aftermath of the virus outbreak, 2020 has certainly been a challenging year for the manufacturing sector. The World Bank predicts the pandemic will push Sub-Saharan Africa into its first recession in 25 years with growth predicted to fall to -3.3% for 2020. Reduced demand has taken its toll on the balance sheet and cash flow of most producers.

South Africa's high water yield areas concentrate mostly along the Drakensberg as it moves south past the western border of Mozambique, through Kwazulu-Natal and thins out before it reaches the Eastern Cape. Then there is a smattering of additional areas along the mountains of the Western Cape. The rest has practically no such zones.