For much of the past decade, the advice to African organisations was to put as much as they could into the public cloud, and many did. When the large global providers opened data centres in South Africa, that became easier still.
Businesses now want to know where each workload should run, what it will cost over five years and who has legal authority over the data it holds. For many, the answers point to a mix of environments, with private cloud doing a bigger share of the work than it did a few years ago.
“I spent 12 years at Microsoft, and a lot of the conversations I had with customers came back to cost and to where their data was being stored,” says Keevan Chun, cloud solution sales specialist at evoila Africa. “That’s still the case, and if anything, I hear it earlier in the conversation now than I used to.”
The cost question
For systems that run steadily all year, the public cloud bill often grows faster than planned, especially when services are priced in dollars and paid for in rand. Broadcom’s Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a global survey of 1,800 senior IT leaders, found that 83% of respondents are considering moving workloads from public to private cloud, and half have already moved some. Cost has now overtaken security as their main worry.
“When I sit down with a finance team, the first thing they want to know is what they’ll be paying next year,” says Chun. “Private cloud has come a long way, and for many workloads it now gives customers what they need at a cost they can plan for.”
Sovereignty moves up the agenda
Where data is stored has moved from a legal footnote to a board-level issue. In South Africa, the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) sets the rules for handling personal information, including when it may be sent across borders. It does not set a national position on sovereignty. That came in May 2024, when the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies published the National Data and Cloud Policy. The policy says data collected in South Africa must be processed in line with South African law, and that government data linked to national security and sovereignty may only be stored on infrastructure inside the country. It also asks government departments to put cloud services first when buying new technology.
Elsewhere on the continent, countries including Kenya and Nigeria have their own data protection laws. For organisations operating in several African markets, that adds up to a patchwork of rules that an offshore-first approach struggles to satisfy.
“For South African customers in regulated industries, being able to keep data in the country and still use a full set of cloud services makes a big difference,” says Chun. “Jurisdiction matters as much as location. Customers want to know which country’s laws apply to their data, as well as which building it sits in.”
What this means for South African businesses
For most South African organisations, the result will be a combination of private and public cloud. A bank might keep core systems and customer records on a private cloud hosted in South Africa and use public cloud for a mobile app with unpredictable traffic. When private cloud is offered as a service, the bank doesn’t need its own hardware or a specialist team to run it.
The next few years
Data centre capacity is growing in more African markets, giving organisations outside South Africa more options to host data at home. Businesses expanding across the continent will increasingly plan for different data rules from the start.
AI will add to the pressure. Organisations that want to run it on customer records, financial data or health information face the same questions about cost and location, often at a larger scale.
“A lot of companies want to try AI on their own data, and the first question from their risk team is where that data will go,” says Chun. “If you already have a private cloud environment you control, that conversation is a lot shorter.”
Investment and new development
Some of the investment in African cloud infrastructure is coming from outside the continent. evoila, a global cloud infrastructure company, acquired South Africa’s Routed earlier this year to form evoila Africa. Demand from local customers drives investment too. Each workload hosted in-country keeps spending in local data centres and builds skills among the engineers and channel partners who support it. Those partners can then build services for particular industries on the same infrastructure.
For development teams, today’s private clouds offer platform and application services as well as infrastructure. “A team can build something new on it or bring an existing application across,” says Chun.
Where to start
Chun suggests beginning with the systems an organisation already runs. “Go through the major workloads one at a time and ask where each one should sit, given what it costs and what the regulator expects. You usually end up with different answers for different systems, and that’s fine.”
He also recommends checking where backup and disaster recovery copies are kept, since these are often missed when organisations map where their data lives. Businesses planning to grow into other African markets should choose platforms that run the same way in each country, so workloads can move without being rebuilt.
“Designing and running VMware private clouds is the team’s day job, on evoila Private Cloud and in customers’ own data centres,” says Chun. “I’m looking forward to helping more organisations across Africa get value from it.”
About evoila Africa
evoila Africa, previously known as Routed, is a division of evoila, a global technology company specialising in the design, deployment and operation of cloud infrastructure. As a Pinnacle Broadcom VMware Cloud Service Provider, evoila Africa is a VMware cloud operator, delivering design, deployment and operation services for VMware private clouds at scale.
Customers can subscribe to evoila Private Cloud, evoila Africa’s VMware private cloud hosted in South Africa, or use its Managed Private Cloud service to run their own or a partner’s VMware Cloud Foundation environment. The company can transact VMware licensing and services throughout Africa, and works with enterprises, cloud service providers and channel partners across the continent.
For more information contact:
Samantha Hogg-Brandjes | GinjaNinja | +27844584857 | [email protected]
