Africas infrastructural challenges threaten cloud-computing penetration

WITH 78 per cent of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) organisations around the world including, the fastest growing economies and established economies already considering, implementing and having adopted cloud computing as part of their IT strategies, developing countries like Nigeria and South Africa may suffer some setbacks if adequate infrastructure are not put in place. This, was revealed by Cisco, a leading network and technology company at the weekend in Lagos at a press briefing on the need for Africa, especially the leading countries to encourage the adoption of cloud computing to boost their operations. Cisco explained that cloud computing has wider market opportunities, which if well harnessed would add values to organisations expansion strategies. It added that countries including China, Brazil, Indonesia, USA, UK, Germany among others are benefiting immensely from cloud computing strategies. According to Vice PresidentCTO, Cloud Computing, Cisco, Lew Turner, the availability of power (energy), broadband penetration, massive investment and improved human capital development were critical to the adoption and sustenance of cloud computing in emerging economies, including Nigeria. Turner said that customers were adopting cloud computing because it services changes the fundamental economies of IT (balance CapExOpEx constraints, reduce deployment times), it serves as new application and information delivery models, which enhances IT efficiency and agility, bring in new waves of innovation and revenue opportunities and also enhance risk management shifts from the user to the provider. According to him, the market opportunities of cloud computing is huge, stressing that even the $500 billion worth of IT equipment purchased over the past five years, optimised for legacy client server workloads will not be adequate to support the next generation cloud computing, virtualisation and mobility workloads of the future. He added that 15,000 applications were supported by Ciscos Data Centre Business Advantage portfolio, through certifications and integration with partners like Microsoft, Novell, Oracle among others. On Ciscos strategy for Cloud Computing, the companys Systems Engineering Manager, English West Africa, Olakunle Oloruntimehin, who said that cloud computing was a way of putting resources together through automation in the cloud, which reduces cost, noted that Ciscos philosophy, strategic focus, enterprise customers, service providers, network platform and cloud diversification were among the strategy adopted by the company for cloud computing. Furthermore, he noted that trends that influences clouds viability includes, user demands, economics, Internet and Technology trends, device proliferation, video, global IP traffic, which is expected to approach 56 exabytes (equivalent of 12.8 billion DVDs) per month in 2013, up from approximately five exabytes per month in 2007.
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