South Africa wants to take on dominant cloud providers

Hanno Labuschagne

Hanno Labuschagne

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South Africa wants to take on dominant cloud providers​

Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, has published a proposed National Data and Cloud Policy, setting out government’s plan to tackle the issue of dominant market powers in the global cloud computing industry.

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform are the three dominant cloud computing platforms in the world.

“The data and cloud computing market structure is dominated by a handful of large multinational companies. The concentration of data within this limited number of corporations poses a risk as it limits possibilities for the extraction of public value from data,” the draft policy stated.
 
There is not much a local regulator can do about international operators that become de facto standards. Vendor lock-in is the name of the game in almost all of the industry.
 
All I have to say is:
Billions wasted in dominant SOEs.
Corruption and theft without end.
But let's take on Cloud providers and ISPs.

Easy money. That's all it is.
 
Where would you like your corporate and financial data to be stored, Azure Cloud or ANC CLoud? They might ban Azure in SA, or require it to be 30% black owned.
 
There are some noble ideals in this actually, but in many ways the cloud providers themselves are working towards these things themselves because their clients are pushing them this way anyway.

Vendor lock-in is a thing of course and always will be and no amount of "legislation" will really solve that problem.

In many ways, in my opinion, Stella should be focusing on making the legislation deal with companies use of personal data (things that POPI is concerned with primarily) and the framework needs to be structured in terms of ensuring that it is built in a way that is transferable and all that. That has a much higher chance of seeing actual results. Data outside of things like POPI, or any other data that is of national concern should be of zero concern of Stellas and a company must be free to do with it as it sees fit.
 
Solitude said:
I don't know what's April Fools jokes anymore.
Click to expand...
The joys of living in ANC land. Every day is a fools day, and every ANC idea is a fools joke. A place where April fools jokes are promoted as real investment oppertunities by the ANC minister.
 
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They are planning on going to Tito`s place and blaze from his ganja farm a cloud big enough to hold the entire worlds data.
 
anc's cloud platform ...

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The issue of dominant service providers feels like a red herring, there are lots of open data and datasets made available like data.gov for the usa and opendataaustralia.gov.au for australia, its up to the individual organsations to make the data accessible regardless of the hosting platform storing the data. And being able to transfer data between providers isn't even an issue, the technology stack is practically homogenous.

Hanno Labuschagne said:
...The concentration of data within this limited number of corporations poses a risk as it limits possibilities for the extraction of public value from data,” the draft policy stated.
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The real target for complaint feel like it is actually the constraint to freely access any data they want, having it on their own infrastructure makes accessing data a lot easier, of course with the requisite tender for cloud infrastructure for the political elite.
 
Benedict A55h0le said:
The joys of living in ANC land. Every day is a fools day, and every ANC idea is a fools joke. A place where April fools jokes are promoted as real investment oppertunities by the ANC minister.
Click to expand...

Yeah, we are the only country in the world experiencing April 1 365 times a year. Thanks to the ANC.
 
The main issue here IMHO is that Cloud Service Providers have Governments whom are their clients.

So with this move S.A gov is essentially saying they'll do it all themselves?

I can't see this working. Ever.
 
Mystic Twilight said:
The issue of dominant service providers feels like a red herring, there are lots of open data and datasets made available like data.gov for the usa and opendataaustralia.gov.au for australia, its up to the individual organsations to make the data accessible regardless of the hosting platform storing the data. And being able to transfer data between providers isn't even an issue, the technology stack is practically homogenous.



The real target for complaint feel like it is actually the constraint to freely access any data they want, having it on their own infrastructure makes accessing data a lot easier, of course with the requisite tender for cloud infrastructure for the political elite.
Click to expand...

You may have a point on this one actually, but they would be very surprised by the reality.

Lets for a second assume they get all of the stuff right and up and running and companies start using this platform to store data. You can be damned sure that any company sensitive data (so pretty much all of it) will be encrypted all over the place with the companies own keys that the government has no access to, so at the end of the day the government will get this lovely set of gibberish when they try access it.
 
ToxicBunny said:
There are some noble ideals in this actually, but in many ways the cloud providers themselves are working towards these things themselves because their clients are pushing them this way anyway.

Vendor lock-in is a thing of course and always will be and no amount of "legislation" will really solve that problem.
Click to expand...
Vendor lock-in is a buzzword created by smaller cloud companies who are not able to compete with the big guns. The reality is that vendor lock-in is embedded in all the latest greatest technology. It is an Amazon or Azure world today.
 
Benedict A55h0le said:
Vendor lock-in is a buzzword created by smaller cloud companies who are not able to compete with the big guns. The reality is that vendor lock-in is embedded in all the latest greatest technology. It is an Amazon or Azure world today.
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Which is bs.

Apple vs. Samsung...
You chose Apple. I chose Samsung.
Now the Government starts production of their own ANC smartphones, because there was vendor lock-in.

Yay. Your freedom of choice is removed.
They are welcome to use their own smartphones. I'll stick with mine.
 
ToxicBunny said:
You may have a point on this one actually, but they would be very surprised by the reality.

Lets for a second assume they get all of the stuff right and up and running and companies start using this platform to store data. You can be damned sure that any company sensitive data (so pretty much all of it) will be encrypted all over the place with the companies own keys that the government has no access to, so at the end of the day the government will get this lovely set of gibberish when they try access it.
Click to expand...
So tell me, how do you query encrypted data? So you have to decrypt a sql tables data before you can query it? Not gonna happen.
 
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