While the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted businesses and the economy, one silver lining is that the event became a catalyst for rapid change and innovation within the enterprise. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, businesses were forced to rethink their operational processes and cater to staff caught in lockdowns turned to technology for solutions – and the cloud provided the answer. 2022 is the year of “big change” for the continent.

In the last few years, driven in no small part by the impact of the pandemic, cloud technology has had a profound effect on healthcare. Despite being one of the last sectors to go all-in on public cloud, the maturity of offerings seems to be finally winning the industry over, opening up significant opportunities for telemedicine and virtual care to adapt to evolving patient and workforce needs.

Driven by customer demand, automation has enabled great strides in enterprise networking. Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) has unlocked the ability for organisations to set up and tear down links between assets and scale bandwidth in real-time, matching the capabilities of the cloud. But in the back end, especially when it comes to settlement, many service providers still rely on manual processes, and this is where blockchain innovation offers much promise.

In networking, latency - sometimes referred to as 'lag' - is the delay between a client request and the service provider's response. In a cloud environment this could be a developer or end-user client request, and the cloud service provider’s response. Or for multi-cloud, it could be one application in a cloud instance, talking to another application in another cloud instance. But no matter which type, latency can have a real impact on an organisation.

Peering has come a long way since the formation of what was arguably the first settlement-free exchange of internet traffic, the Commercial Internet eXchange in Reston, Virginia, in 1991. Today there are over 600 IXs around the globe helping to peer thousands of IP networks. The internet and the technology that underpins it is a very different landscape in 2022 than it was in 1991.

At first, the benefits of public cloud adoption are clearly recognisable: newfound agility through an all-you-can-eat and on demand buffet of services, platforms, and infrastructure. But without appropriate monitoring, guardrails and process changes, this can change fast. While the perception is that cloud offers unlimited scalability and lower costs by only charging for the resources you use, the truth is that customers pay for the resources they order, whether they use them or not.

It seems like every conversation is about inflation lately. Everything is getting more expensive and the news cycle suggests there is little chance of that abating. Inflation and supply chain challenges are having a knock on effect in terms of cloud adoption and network usage. We’ve already seen some of the big providers increase their prices - so what’s to be done? Can technology also offer solutions for stemming the rise of IT costs?

The internet is a network of networks, and how and where those networks interconnect determines the efficacy of the service. How networks exchange traffic on the internet varies. Broadly speaking there are three different approaches: A direct connection via a transit provider, a private interconnection between two networks, or peering at an internet exchange (IX) point - a co-location hub that enables members of the IX to interconnect.

The cloud is helping organisations in the media and entertainment sector unlock new levels of efficiency and speed as they find themselves under pressure to produce and distribute content faster than ever before. In our latest blog we look at how a Network-as-a-Service model can enhance their multi-cloud strategy.

In retail, the cloud changes everything because it offers flexibility and the opportunity to do things better, or to do things that were previously impossible, for a lower cost. This is especially true in a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environment, where retailers can connect their legacy private data centres with public clouds to enhance their offering and make it more competitive.