Public sector 1

E-mail in the cloud not so easy

Moving your e-mail to the cloud needs very careful consideration.

14 July 2014

Is South African cloud adoption stagnating? In its 2013 Hype Cycle for Africa, the Gartner Group said, “Cloud in general, and software as a service together with infrastructure as a service, still have relatively poor adoption levels, primarily due to a lack of large hosting datacentres and easily-available broadband capacity.” South Africa placed way behind the rest of the BRICS with a dismal 3% growth year on year in cloud adoption. Even e-mail, which would seem to be one of the easiest business applications to move to the cloud, is lagging behind. Gartner put it in the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ for Africa and said it is encumbered by long and troublesome migration processes, difficulty in meeting customisation, and lack of insight into upcoming changes and operational processes.

South African CIOs certainly recognise the importance of cloud. Shaheed Jooma, senior manager of e-business and technical solutions at the SA Post Office says his organisation can’t ignore industry trends. “We’re looking at dint delivery methods to deliver IT services and one of the reasons for that is to avoid the huge capital expenditures when doing so,” he says. “It makes sense for an enterprise that requires scalability. But before we even think about public cloud, we need to have a runtime environment in our own private infrastructure that will make the journey to public cloud feasible.”

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