Public cloud services have emerged in recent years as core contributors to the ICT sector’s growth. The market is expanding rapidly, with Africa expecting more than $15bn in data centre investment between 2020 and 2025, much of which will be concentrated in Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. In a similar vein, revenue from public cloud services in the MENA region was expected to grow by 21% in 2020 to reach $3bn, according to global research and advisory company Gartner.
The development of these services proved to be central to facilitating the economy’s shift to remote work after the outbreak of Covid-19, as companies moved their operations to reliable cloud platforms in order to use video-conferencing applications and other remote-work technologies. The cloud allowed both employees and customers to carry out daily operations and transactions at home. Moreover, cloud services enable greater levels of outsourcing and flexibility for companies to more easily scale up or down according to demand. This allows businesses to effectively manage their resources and reduce costs without any interruption to workflow.
Private sector partnerships played a vital role in facilitating remote learning during the pandemic. For example, telecoms provider Orange Egypt partnered with global tech company Avaya to provide digital solutions, including cloudbased video-conferencing platform Avaya
Spaces, for educational purposes at no charge. Meanwhile, in late March 2020 the Vodafone Egypt Foundation launched an e-learning platform with publishing group Nahdet Misr to help students continue their education after inperson learning was suspended. Cloud technology will also underpin the New Administrative Capital (NAC), the smart city that, once complete, will host government ministries, diplomatic missions, international universities and residential neighbourhoods. The pandemic delayed trial operations, which were initially planned to take place in the second half of 2020, until the first half of 2021. In January 2020 urban development authorities signed an agreement with Orange Egypt to build and operate the NAC’s data centre and cloud facilities. The data centre was officially inaugurated in March of that year, in cooperation with Chinese tech giant Huawei. Cloud-computing services were also made available to corporate clients, further facilitating the shift to remote work as Covid-19 lockdowns were announced and implemented.
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