During the Industrial age, industry was at the “head” of value chains. Now, however, industrial firms are subordinate to digital firms. The implications are profound. It means that the barriers of entry to small enterprises could well be lowered as the quantum of fixed capital requited of enterprises would go down as they use digital technology, build on digital technology, innovate around digital technology.

South African businesses have been slow to adopt Cloud due to a lack of local infrastructure, data protection concerns and conservative investment strategies. But this is set to change. The IDC forecasts that at least one major global Cloud provider will establish local Data Centre infrastructure to service the region in 2017.

This will address key concerns and spur competition and adoption while putting pressure on local providers. New public Cloud spend will overtake On-premise in areas such as Collaborative applications, Application development software and platforms, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

While private Cloud should remain an investment priority, local businesses should still be working to develop the capabilities required to move workloads into the public Cloud if/when the need arises.

With products, as the ones listed below, it has now become easier to digitally transform your business:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) – The technology allows Subscribers to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, available all the time, through the Internet. AWS’s version of virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer including hardware (CPU(s) & GPU(s) for processing, local/RAM memory, hard-disk/SSD storage); a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases and CRM.
• Azure – Microsoft Azure is simply the Microsoft product name for the Microsoft Cloud. Azure is a Cloud computing platform plus infrastructure created by Microsoft for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed Data Centres. There are 34 interconnected Microsoft Data Regions around the world with more planned.
• Office 365 – The brand encompasses plans that allow use of the Microsoft Office software suite over the life of the subscription, as well as cloud-based software as a service products for business environments, such as hosted Exchange Server, Skype for Business Server, and SharePoint among others. All Office 365 plans include automatic updates to their respective software at no additional charge, as opposed to conventional licenses for these programs, where new versions require purchase of a new license.
• G Suite – G Suite comprises of  Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, and Google+ for communication; Drive for storage; Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Sites for collaboration; and, depending on the plan, an Admin panel and Vault for managing users and the services. It also includes the digital interactive whiteboard Jamboard.