IBM recently held a Hybrid Cloud Roundtable looking at the Middle East and Africa (MEA) in the region, unpacking some of the findings that the company has gleaned following a study conducted by research firm International Data Corporation (IDC).

The survey, which polled over 500 C-Suite executives across 12 industries in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and South Africa, offered some interesting insight as far as the popularity of hybrid cloud locally is concerned. 

To that end, 84 percent of South African C-Suite executives are either pursuing or planning hybrid cloud strategies, deeming it vital to their organisation’s future.

“C-Suite executives in South Africa are prioritising the implementation of hybrid cloud strategies to benefit from flexibility, cost savings, testing and development, as well as disaster recovery. While the study highlights this growing shift towards the cloud a year on from the initial lockdown which saw businesses of all sizes across the country adopt remote work strategies -further adoption of hybrid cloud strategies are needed to help organisations transform their operations using technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI),” explains IBM’s feedback on the study. 

While there is a high number of execs who are actively looking at hybrid cloud, they are divided into clear two categories – 32 percent currently pursuing hybrid cloud strategies and 60 percent in the planning phase.

As for why hybrid is being pursued to this extent in SA, cost and experimentation have been highlighted by those who were surveyed.

“Just over half of the executives expected flexibility and significant cost savings from implementing a hybrid cloud strategy, while 58 per cent view cloud as useful for conducting testing and development before moving their business-critical workloads to a production environment,” adds the report.

Another key factor is the ability to modernise their operations in general. “67% C-Suite executives stated the ease of application deployment in adopting hybrid cloud in their businesses, whilst 41% want to leverage the operational benefits and 67% believe the technology will improve their resource allocation,” notes IBM.

As we have seen over the past year under the pandemic, digital transformation is something that has been heavily prioritised by companies, many of which have been scrambling to get a strategy in place, with hybrid cloud viewed as an enabler thereof.

“It is evident that hybrid cloud strategies are becoming core to digital transformation journeys and increasingly prioritized in South Africa to help revolutionize business models,” says Hamilton Ratshefola (pictured in header), GM of IBM Southern Africa.

“IBM is working with its customers in South Africa and across the globe to accelerate their hybrid cloud efforts and prepare them for transformational technologies like AI. As organisations in South Africa transform their operations, hybrid cloud will continue to be adopted to provide flexibility and efficiencies and improve the bottom line,” he added.

As such, hybrid cloud is indeed à la mode at the moment in SA.