If a South African business wants to get going with public cloud services, its best bet is to go outside the country and sign up with any one of a number of overseas providers. The cost of bandwidth and the latency aren’t the best, the support varies wildly and the exchange rate is a pain, but hey, at least it’s cloud. IBM wants to change all this and has introduced a public cloud service for the local market – the first public cloud service in this country, in fact, called SmartCloud. It’s the local flavour of the international offering that’s been going for a couple of years now. SA is also getting its own IBM Cloud Datacentre and IBM Cloud Lab linked to the company’s global network. Werner Lindemann, VP for global technology solutions in sub-Saharan Africa, jokes that he nagged for the local datacentres because the latency and bandwidth to Europe weren’t acceptable.

“We’re only the fourth country in the world to get both a Cloud Lab and a Cloud Datacentre,” says Lindemann. “This is the first opportunity for enterprise clients in South Africa to benefit from hybrid private cloud offerings that offer predetermined service level agreements on a Software as a Service (SaaS) or utility computing-based model, while also conforming to governance issues around data storage. Although we’ve been doing cloud for the last 18 months for customers inside their datacentres, this is the first enterprise-grade catalogue-based solution for the South African market.”