Africa Cloud Business Survey 2023

Unlocking the transformational power of cloud in Africa

Overview

In a landscape of rapidly advancing technology, CEOs in Africa are strategically positioning their investments to secure a competitive advantage through emerging technologies, including generative AI, advanced analytics and industry cloud. Among these, the linchpin for optimising value is cloud transformation.

When it comes to cloud transformation maturity, our Africa Cloud Business Survey reveals that organisations in Africa are at a turning point. Those that have already started their cloud journeys need to accelerate and refine their approaches; those that have not are quickly falling behind.

Our survey shows that organisations across EMEA are prioritising and pursuing large-scale migrations towards new technology platforms, with African organisations in particular opting for a more iterative approach. Figure 1 (below) shows that in Africa, many organisations are going beyond a mere ‘lift and shift’ with over 40% focusing on a combination of migration, modernisation and cloud-native development to change their businesses. Compared to businesses in EMEA, modernisation is often the first step in adopting cloud to enable real enterprise-wide transformation.

Figure 1: Primary reason for leveraging cloud technology

Africa has witnessed an encouraging surge in cloud adoption across its business landscape. Over 50% of companies in Africa have already adopted cloud technologies in all or most parts of their operations, aligned to the overall maturity of respondents across EMEA. The outlook is even more promising, with 61% of enterprises planning to transition all their operations to the cloud within the next two years.

This focus on cloud adoption now and in the near term is not entirely surprising, since cloud is recognised as an enabler of economic growth across Africa.

Survey methodology

Between April and May 2023, PwC surveyed 2,209 Business and Tech leaders across EMEA from Western Europe (56%), Central & Eastern Europe (18%), Middle East (19%) and Africa (7%).

Respondents were from public and private companies in seven major industries: industrial products (22%), financial services (18%), consumer markets (18%), technology, media and telecommunications (18%), energy, utilities and resources (11%), health (8%) and government & public sector (4%).