Africa moves to cloud faster and cheaper with Google Cloud

Businesses across the continent are discovering that Google Cloud is allowing agility and innovation faster and more affordably.

Organisations of all sizes are fast-tracking their move to the cloud, although many are still grappling with misconceptions, complexity and unexpected costs as they do so.This is according to Digicloud Africa, whose partner network is helping hundreds of organisations across the continent to harness the benefits of the cloud simply and affordably, using Google Cloud.

Sizwe Mabanga, Customer Engineer at Digicloud Africa, says the pandemic helped catalyse Africa’s move to cloud.This started with the move to a remote workforce which then provided the business case for moving compute to the cloud.He cites the recent Cloud Africa 2020 study (conducted by World Wide Worx for F5, Digicloud and Dell) which found that around 78% of organisations expected to have moved some – or even all – of their applications to the cloud by the end of 2020.38% increased their spend on cloud in the past year, led by South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Botswana, and 61% of respondents expected their spend on cloud services to increase in the next year.

“We find that the key business cases for moving to the cloud include disaster recovery, supporting remote working and customer service; with many organisations seeing the cloud as a more cost effective environment.However, the cloud can also be a complex environment, and there are hurdles for organisations to overcome.Key challenges include misconceptions around compliance and data in the cloud; a lack of in-house cloud skills; and unexpected costs associated with the cloud.”

He notes that Google Cloud addresses these concerns. “The Cloud Africa survey indicated that Google is the key cloud provider among our respondents – at 54% – followed by Microsoft Azure at 40%. Other cloud providers accounted for 3% or less. Google Cloud costs are around 20% lower than the price of comparative services of other public clouds, with certain features free at entry level. Solutions like Google Anthos support management of the environment across on-premise, private and public clouds, making hybrid cloud management, security and compliance simpler.And cost control is easily achieved by setting automated consumption limits and alerts,” he says.

Digicloud and its 47-strong partner network helps organisations overcome the skills shortfall by deploying cloud and niche industry experts to help migrate and manage new cloud environments.

Moving to Google Cloud can revolutionise a business in under a month. Digicloud has case studies in which their partners have migrated customers to the cloud in as little as two weeks, and they are immediately able to start innovating and building applications.

Digicloud’s certified Google Cloud resellers are providing the expert skills and resources to help small, midsize and large organisations to assess their portfolios, develop their cloud roadmaps, identify cost reduction opportunities, support migration and optimise their environments as they harness Google Cloud, she says.

The Digicloud ecosystem’s approach quantifies the benefits of infrastructure and application migration and modernisation with Google Cloud based on a Total Cost of Ownership assessment; which allows organisations to weigh up investment required and value to be realised by harnessing ML, APIs, collaboration tools and new platforms to improve infrastructure and processes.

To see real-world examples of operational efficiencies and cost optimisation achieved with Google Cloud, see Google’s whitepaper ‘Understanding the Principles of Cost Optimisation’.

To find a Google Cloud reseller to start your cost optimisation journey, contact Digicloud https://www.digicloud.africa/contact-us/