Data literacy and infrastructure remain challenges in South Africa

The lack of data literacy and data infrastructure in South Africa is a huge problem. South Africans need to be educated on how to use data sufficiently.

These were sentiments shared by Sithabile Technology Services cloud technology specialist Amith Sekalle during a media roundtable on Wednesday in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The exec also said South Africa is not entirely into using cloud services as much as it could be.

"South Africa has not moved 100% into the cloud, they are still in the transition and transformational phase in terms of fully migrating their applications from hybrid to cloud applications like AWS as well as Azure," Sekalle added.

"I believe people and companies are ready to move into cloud, however, 40% of companies in the country do not understand what cloud is and how they can use it," he explained.

Sekalle said data literacy and infrastructure is still a huge issue in the country.

South African data opportunities

According to Sithabile Technology Services senior enterprise consultant Malcolm Tiley, data has been called the new gold; however, that definition falls far short of data's actual value in modern industrialized societies.

"Furthermore, 90% of the world's data was created in the last two years and 67% of that data is unstructured, therefore, there is huge potential for South African companies to optimize multi-cloud strategies," Tiley continued.

Tiley believes that South African companies need to embrace data opportunities and understand that data is the fuel feeding highly responsive and efficient enterprises.

90% of the world's data was created in the last two years and 67% of that data is unstructured. (Source: Image by Freepik).

He said, however, that even though companies need to embrace multi-cloud strategies and work with specialists that help manage data, that management of data needs to be done responsibly.

"It is pointless recovering data that was lost but not being able to use that recovered data," he continued.

He added that it is everyone's shared obligation to ensure that data is stored responsibly, and there also needs to be a push toward reducing the cost of long-term data retention.

With artificial intelligence being the new technology that everyone is talking about, Tiley said companies needed to leverage the new technology to manage data.

"AI is in everything that people are using; it is no longer a question of whether to use AI. Everyone just needs to embrace it, especially when it comes to data management," Tiley concluded.

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*Top image source: Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik

— Matshepo Sehloho, Associate Editor, Connecting Africa