Quick discussion with a leading Kenyan IT director

Visiting A leading university today I had the pleasure of bumping into the University’s IT Director. The quick five minute conversation covered the issue of cloud. I asked her the question, “would you consider moving your IT to the cloud?”.

“Yes”, she said, “once the IT systems, policies and procedures were fully settled and more importantly when I get assurances about 100% connectivity by the service providers”.

In her estimation many IT managers would consider outsourcing once the service levels across all important stacks were guaranteed.

Later on, I joined IT chiefs meeting at the East Africa IT Leaders from taking place at Safari Park Hotel. The same conversation came up. Once leading bank CIO actually said he would not consider it feasible to consider this unless the service provider could guarantee uptime and service levels and most importantly data security.

All agreed that for services like email where some current service providers like google (on gmail) had established a proven track record, it would be less risky to farm out corporate email. Indeed some leading global corporations are now running gmail as their email platform as an example. (For the record here, my comments do not equate to an endorsement or otherwise of Gmail. I merely use it here as an example).

The cloud provides interesting opportunities for service providers to worry less about IT infrastructure and focus on where they create the most value. I congratulate Safaricom on the launch on their Safaricom Cloud and encourage the market to better understand how to leverage it for business gain.