Generally speaking, Africa already has a strong reputation for solution-based innovation to tackle various everyday challenges on the continent. This is certainly more than just a pipe-dream. As the likes of Google, Uber and Netflix have shown, with the right Cloud platforms, we can create digital services that can be scaled limitlessly, exported anywhere across the world. We need to look beyond the local economy, or our local politics, and see the opportunities at a broader, global level. But with the Cloud, these services become available to far more individuals. It was difficult to roll-out more broadly through a given academic institution, and often the access to these services became the exclusive preserve of a select few academics or researchers. In the ‘pre-Cloud’ era, accessing this kind of computing power was very expensive. Our tertiary institutions can now access world-class infrastructure and high-speed data analysis services, helping to advance a number of specialised fields in academia, medicine, technology and industry.Ĭonducting in-depth scientific and academic research at scale requires powerful computing resources. Local companies can unlock new routes to global markets, get involved in new value-chains, and start offering the kinds of services that are only possible in countries with powerful enterprise computing platforms close at hand. We’re entering a truly exciting era, where there are no longer any reasons to hold back with radical digitisation plans. The availability of local hyper-scale Cloud platforms finally cracks open the innovation landscape in SA. By focusing on re-skilling, particularly young people, we can leverage this opportunity? It’s time for urgent and decisive moves, from corporates, government, training authorities, and higher learning institutions. Most encouragingly, having local cloud platforms will ensure that we can retain skills in country including datacentre management and other ICT infrastructure skills, and grow into the likes of data science, big data-driven business modelling, IoT solutions design, and more.

These jobs will be replaced by new vocations such as those listed by FastCompany*: digital death managers, 3D printing handymen, microbial balancers, “urban shepherds” and “corporate disorganisers”. Various trend-spotting firms, futurists and analysts predict that a high percentage of today’s jobs will not exist 10 to 20 years into the future. Opportunities to re-learn the digital world and re-skill for the future workplace. This will not only accelerate the levels of innovation and digitisation within South African companies, but (perhaps most importantly) it will present new opportunities for individuals. Think of augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, real-time data analytics and machine-driven decision making, artificial intelligence, and other emergent technologies.

With latency speeds in the milliseconds (rather than the hundreds of milliseconds) a world of new business opportunities opens up. With local access to this scale of computing power, local organisations will be able to explore opportunities presented by the fourth industrial revolution.

Fastcompany digital media kit