August 2022 – AfricanCloud

[Column] Richard Muthua: Kenya and Africa are ready to join the future of Cloud

It is sometimes too easy for the world to wrongfully assume that Africa lags too far behind the global cloud innovation revolution happening. That is a fundamentally flawed outlook.

As of 2021, our continent accounted only for USD 1.2 billion of the global public cloud market, it has more than doubled in the past three years and continues to grow exponentially year on year. Soon, Africa will be among the world’s leading cloud innovators, and countries like Kenya will be at the forefront.

It has been inspiring to witness first-hand the continued growth of Kenya’s tech sector. Ongoing expansion and improvement of data infrastructure are playing a critical role in pushing national economic growth beyond expectations.

As of March 2022, total data and internet subscriptions in Kenya surpassed 46 million, according to a recent Communications Authority of Kenya report. This equates to 93.9 per cent of the Kenyan population compared to 31.4 per cent that were connected in 2013. The pandemic only intensified this growth as many businesses adopted remote working methods – calling for more adept cloud adoption strategies.

In addition to cloud, the digital revolution also led to the creation of new skills in the fields of artificial intelligence, big data and mobile robotics.

It would not be surprising to see 2022 become the year many African industries experience a massive surge in cloud solutions. This is already driven by the impetus of digital transformation strategies across the board and a need to gain a competitive advantage in a new normal.

The reality of Africa’s historical low economic growth is the very reason that the continent is ideally suited for the speedy adoption of cloud technology. As Kenya, and the rest of Africa, look towards economic recovery and growth, cloud is the answer to cutting costs and increasing efficiencies as businesses move away from the requirement of hardware and installation.

But this doesn’t happen overnight, and it certainly doesn’t happen alone.

Liquid’s cloud ambition lies in partnerships

At Liquid Intelligent Technologies (Liquid), we have proudly built Africa’s largest independently owned fibre network. While that is a fantastic achievement, our ambition also lies in the cloud. We are part of a mission to build Africa’s largest-ever data centre in Lagos, Nigeria, which is being spearheaded by Africa Data Centres, another organisation under the Cassava Technologies House of Brands. This development will spur cloud innovation that has never been seen before on African soil. However, this will require some key players.

As Liquid continues to make headway with the East-West fibre lines across the continent, especially through areas like the Congo, more interest will be generated from these multinational tech giants – adding to the exponential growth curve.

Cloud is the best cybersecurity on the market

One of the biggest deterrents of cloud adoption lies in the belief that a migration to the cloud will lead to more cyber-attacks. While this could be true, it is also true that the advancement and rising complexity of the average cybercriminal syndicate means that businesses need to invest more in protecting their cyber assets. With cloud, the benefit of economies of scale and availability of skill within a cloud service provider environment makes it easier to secure your cyber assets with the most up-to-date technologies at par with the threats. This could otherwise be too expensive and technically unachievable for an organisation using the on-premises option.

This will need accredited and capable partners to bring this to life. Liquid’s offering is designed to protect customers at every intersection of their digitally transformed business including network, people, and systems, revolutionising how cyber security is approached. Our approach provides small and large business owners, enterprises, and government entities with secure cloud services that help them get an edge of their competitors on the continent and beyond.

Cloud is the pathway to start-up success

The last two years have emphasised the need to leverage digital channels to deliver on value propositions. Cloud allows businesses, especially those who are young and ready to grow, a pathway that is ready to scale at a moment’s notice.

Since latency is such a widespread issue in Africa, serving a customer as quickly as possible is the key to competitive advantage, which is life or death in a start-up landscape. Nobody wants to see loading screens and unnecessary buffers when trying to access mission-critical systems. As soon as the customer experience is interrupted, the customer is already thinking of the competitor.

However, none of this would be possible without a key player in the market who understands the need for resilient and scalable infrastructure—those being infrastructure providers like Liquid.

For example, in May 2022, Liquid partnered with PEACE Cable Company to introduce 800Gbps of additional subsea capacity in Mombasa on the highly-anticipated global submarine cable. This will increase the availability of high-performance and reliable Internet connectivity access across Africa, leveraging Liquid’s 100,000km of terrestrial fibre across 12 countries.

The continent needs more proud enablers of cloud success. Through the right partnerships, programmes and events, we can continue to provide a platform for businesses and entrepreneurs alike to succeed in a digital economy and do so through the cloud – one of the most significant enablers of the fourth industrial revolution.

Richard Muthua is the Executive Head, Cloud and Cyber Security at Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Kenya

When it comes to growing your cloud solutions business, customers are looking for value, not cheap solutions, Routed

Infrastructure is the foundation upon which businesses thrive and managed service providers build their businesses, but in today’s environment you need to offer unique solutions that show your customers value if you intend to grow, says Andrew Cruise, Routed Managing Director. Routed is a leading vendor-neutral specialist VMware Cloud provider in South Africa.

A quick search of the current technology trends for this year and beyond reveals much of what we expect: the accelerated rate of digitisation in business and society, together with ever-increasing data volumes, have customers asking for stability, security, backup and redundancy, which are reliable and can scale. It’s a complicated task for any organisation.

The legendary Formula 1 commentator Murray Walker once said: “The lead car is absolutely unique, except for the one behind it, which is identical,” many managed service providers (MSP) are discovering specialising in the same solutions and providing the same cloud solutions from Azure, AWS or any of the other hyperscalers, poses another challenge. When MSPs offer similar solutions, they begin competing on price and risking margin. And the simplicity with which the customer can switch service providers places MSPs and their business at further risk.

The business of cloud, hybrid and multi-cloud is poised to become big business. If it is not on a customer’s technology roadmap yet, it will be soon. For clients of MSPs, cloud solutions for storage, network and processing mean costs and risks of setting up expensive infrastructure to try out new ideas are heavily mitigated. Hybrid solutions, for when public cloud services aren’t suitable, have also matured to the point where they can provide a ‘best of both’ solution.

In much the same way that hardware resellers became MSPs in the late 90s and early 2000s by growing their business by offering additional hardware, software and networking support services to customers, today’s MSPs are going to grow by being able to understand how to leverage the cloud in their client’s environments and offering a unique selling point. Unfortunately, offering the same solution as other MSPs and systems integrators is not it.

Microsoft partners are a dime a dozen, and its Azure services are an easy sell into many organisations, but they do not come without their own challenges. Sporadic outages, little support and surprise price increases are not uncommon. For MSPs competing on price, these issues erode what little margin there was in the deal. It shouldn’t be this way. Not in an environment that is in an intense growth phase.

Clients seek value, not the cheapest solution; the challenge for MSPs is how they define what is unique to them and demonstrate their value. For MSPs, there’s a good margin to be made, too, but it requires that MSPs step out of the perceived Azure (and other hyperscalers) comfort zone to offer a broader range of services.

Cloud will grow regardless. However, MSPs who offer value will grow exponentially. This may require a little bit of a learning curve to onboard new technology, but what is often found is that cloud operators, like Routed, will provide world-class support to ensure a smooth transition – something which hyperscalers tend to charge additional fees for.

Partnering with an accredited cloud provider is also more sensible than an MSP building its own cloud. In much the same way the client has a relationship with the MSP to provide outsourced technology solutions, Routed is ideally positioned to offer proven vendor-neutral VMware Cloud solutions.

Routed’s Cloud is simple to provision, manages customer workloads, and offers self-service. And for those with the ability to set up networks, servers, and applications, setting up and managing the cloud for customers will not require a complex new business strategy and resourcing plan.

Having large workloads move to the cloud is inevitable, but unless MSPs carefully consider how they solve this for their clients, they are putting themselves at risk.

MSPs are a valuable part of the ecosystem and sit at a crossroads: take the path most travelled and congested with people who look just like them, or choose the other? The destination might be the same, but the reward will be greater, not only for the MSP, but for the client, too.

routed.co.za

[South Africa] Netskope further expands NewEdge Security Private Cloud in Africa

Netskope has announced its continued global expansion of the Netskope NewEdge network with an additional data centre now launched and taking traffic in South Africa.

The new Cape Town deployment complements the existing Johannesburg infrastructure to address growing customer demand and provide more in-region capacity and redundancy. NewEdge is now powered by data centres in 57 regions, with everyone providing full compute for security traffic processing, the full breadth of SSE services, and accessibility to every Netskope customer without surcharges.

Grant Reynolds, Regional Manager for South Africa at Netskope, said “Every year the threat landscape becomes larger and more complex, and regulatory requirements for data protection grow, and so it is no surprise that we are seeing strong growth across Africa. Organisations are eager to adopt an SSE approach to security so that they can embrace working practices and cloud technologies that enhance productivity while ensuring their security policies follow data wherever it goes.

“In practice, however, you cannot place your security at the ‘edge’ without powerful in-region infrastructure as part of a distributed and dedicated service edge, and that is why we are investing in NewEdge around the world. NewEdge is capable of inspecting massive amounts of data locally, with no need for complex, latency-prone backhauling or reliance on unpredictable public transport.”

Netskope has been in partnership with value-added distributor Exclusive Networks Africa, throughout the continent, since late last year. Stefan van de Giessen, Exclusive Networks Africa Country Manager: SA and SADC, explains: “We investigated multiple cloud vendors to supplement our security strategy, and were attracted by Netskope’s NewEdge Network – its globally distributed private cloud network, which serves as the network foundation for the Netskope platform, as well as an enabler for current and future Netskope capabilities. We congratulate Netskope on this new development, which will enhance its leadership in the SASE space even further.”
As the infrastructure underpinning the Netskope Security Cloud, NewEdge delivers real-time inline and out-of-band API-driven services spanning Cloud Firewall (FWaaS), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Cloud and SaaS Security Posture Management (CSPM/SSPM), and more.

In addition to accelerating the adoption of a Zero Trust approach, the performance-focused NewEdge architecture ensures there are no performance trade-offs when security is implemented. This approach reduces the risk of users working around security controls, productivity being negatively affected, or business processes being slowed down or impeded.

Placing data-centric security as close to the user as possible is a key requirement of a SASE-ready architecture and the delivery of world-class Security Service Edge (SSE) capabilities. NewEdge’s expanding global coverage also addresses unique enterprise business requirements and compliance objectives, such as having a data centre in-region for content localisation or to ensure customer traffic stays within intent-based zones.

In addition, every NewEdge data centre is extensively peered with the most commonly used web/CDN, cloud, and SaaS providers to deliver fast, optimised access to the content, apps, and data enterprises most care about. For example, every NewEdge data centre is directly connected with Microsoft and Google, plus other peering relationships in key regions with Amazon, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Box, and Dropbox, among many others.

Funzani Madi, Executive: Information Security (Chief Information Security Officer) for Netskope customer Telkom South Africa noted that “It is important for us that data processing occurs within our home jurisdiction, providing tangible improvements to user experience. The new Cape Town NewEdge facility further demonstrates Netskope’s commitment to the African continent.”

Danie Burger, Information Security Specialist at impact.com, a leading partnership management platform and Netskope customer, added “As a Cape Town-based organisation, having local cloud infrastructure for our security makes a material difference to our users’ experience. With offices and clients around the world, it’s imperative that we don’t create unduly lengthy data flows for security. With infrastructure located in Cape Town, and peered connections to all our main cloud services, we can introduce in-line security controls, speeding up access to cloud services.”

With more than 1,500 customers, Netskope serves some of the world’s largest and most technically demanding organisations.

www.netskope.com