Tag: Ralph Berndt

Globally, companies are embracing multi-cloud and hybrid strategies. In 2023 alone, organisations spent $270 billion on cloud infrastructure services. This represented a $45 billion increase compared to the previous year. As such, connectivity must now adapt to handle the complexity of data transit across dispersed geographic locations.

If you ask any South African tech leader what keeps them up at night, chances are the answer will not just be the country’s unreliable energy grid or regulations. You can add skills to that list as well. More precisely, the lack thereof. As businesses push ahead with digital transformation, the demand for specialised IT skills has never been higher.

The emergence of Edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fundamentally transforming the way we think about data processing and decision-making. By shifting data analysis and processing to the very ‘edge’ of a company’s network, decision-makers can ensure their remote offices can access real-time computing across multiple locations.

Hybrid work, the rise of the Internet of Things, and analysing data close to the edge mean traditional ways of safeguarding data are no longer sufficient. Zero Trust has emerged as a more proactive way for businesses to keep their systems, data, and networks protected against compromise.

Even prior to the pandemic, organisations had begun putting in place elements to manage distributed employees whether that be through corporate remote desktop or virtual private networking (VPN) capabilities. However, this was not done at the scale and at a rate required to manage the disruption caused by COVID-19.

With the cloud services market expected to grow at a rate of 28% over the next five years to top R23 billion by 2023, South African companies have finally woken up to its potential. Providing some of the impetus behind this is the local availability of Microsoft Azure data centres.