Oracle Kenya held its annual Cloud Day event at Safari Park Hotel in Nairobi. Oracle Cloud Day, previously known as Oracle Day is in its fourth year and seeks to bring together private and public sector players from customers; partners, stakeholders and government officials in various sectors to discuss how Cloud is transforming business today. Today’s event also marked a graduation ceremony for 48 university graduates trained on Java Programming, Database and Oracle Financials through the the Presidential Digital Talent Program.
Some of the areas discussed included powering the Digital Business with Cloud, how businesses spark innovation and gain competitive advantage as well as accelerating transformation to private cloud service provider. According to Dr Gilbert Saggia, country manager for Oracle Kenya the focus of a business should remain innovation and agility in order to remain ahead of the competition and remain innovative. “Our focus as Oracle is to remove the complexity, to simplify IT and provide the most comprehensive cloud offering”, he added. Businesses are increasingly deploying cloud computing solutions, which is largely a consumer driven decision. According to Michael Wachira of Intel, Over 200,000 smartphones are sold in Kenya monthly which makes it 2.4 million devices annually. This means more that 6,000 servers to handle the traffic through these devices. Utilization is however not always guaranteed hence the need for cloud solutions which offer standardized and optimized solutions.
Widely discussed is the issue of security in Cybersecurity. According to McAfee in 2005, business were faced with 25 new malware on a daily basis. The number of threats has grown to 500,000 daily in 2015, with the cybersecurity business now worth over 1 Trillion dollars. Increasingly, consumers are using connected devices with a research by Intel estimating that over 200 billion devices will be connected by 2030. That said, businesses should continually invest more resources into fighting cyber crime. “Today, the cost of technology is no longer considered an issue for any company that wants to use IT to drive business innovation,” said Dr Saggia. In the cloud we are seeing a generational shift in computing as significant as the shift to personal computing was forty years ago.
