Microsoft’s Azure cloud services are a lot more popular with South African businesses than most provided by other companies competing in the same space.
This emerged in the results of a cloud study conducted by local tech site MyBroadband published in May.
The survey asked over 300 IT decision-makers from South African businesses to answer questions about how they are using the cloud within their respective organisations.
While the survey also showed that Google is the most popular cloud platform of the options available locally, Microsoft’s Azure came in second with only a modest margin separating the two companies.
Google Cloud came in first with 39.19% of the vote, Microsoft Azure second with 32.16%. The third-most-popular platform was Amazon Web Services (AWS), with 12.97% of the respondents indicating they were using it.
The As-a-Service advantage
The survey also showed that the most popular cloud services adopted by local companies were cloud backup solutions. By backing up to the cloud, companies can eliminate the need for relatively expensive and complicated on-premises backup solutions.
In addition, migrating to a cloud backup solution is very easy thanks to the advanced migration tools available on Azure.
Another cloud service gaining popularity with the country’s businesses is cloud-based telecoms, which move telecoms equipment like PBXes into the cloud and off-premise.
The core appeal of doing this is that it retains PBX functionality while making configuration and deployment of new and existing phone services that much easier while costing less than on-premise telephony.
23% of business not in the cloud… yet
And overall, 77.03% of the South African businesses surveyed indicated they were using cloud services, showing increased gravitation toward the cloud and business’s recognition of cloud as a cost-effective provider of business-critical services.
When asked to indicate which cloud services provide the biggest benefits to their businesses, respondents indicated that data backup, disaster recovery, and cost savings were their top three.
Local is definitely lekker
Othelo Vieira, Microsoft CSP Product Manager at Tarsus On Demand, the Tarsus Technology Group’s cloud division, says “Having Azure services inside South Africa’s borders is a game-changer for local business, so it’s entirely understandable that Azure’s popularity is taking off here.”
[Image by Andreas Breitling from Pixabay]
