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The South African government has moved away from its original plans to create a government-owned data centre as outlined in the 2021 draft version of the policy.

The newly released national cloud and data policy still advocates for the government to adopt a cloud-first data strategy, but gives public sector institutions the leeway to choose their own private cloud vendors.

The State IT Agency (Sita) will, however, still serve as a facilitator to “ensure the development and monitoring of service-level agreements” between various arms of government and private service providers.

One of the main goals of the national cloud and data policy is to move all government IT services to the cloud. The architects of the policy feel that this will allow for more digital services for citizens by facilitating seamless integration among different government agencies.

“South Africa must develop the capacity to exploit fully the opportunities presented by a data-driven economy.”

The final version of the policy has been met with much more favour than the 2021 version, with regulatory specialist, Lisa Dyer, saying the government has taken note of the inputs from various stakeholders and adopted a more “practical” approach in this version compared to 2021’s draft.

“Clearly, they’ve taken a lot of input and the ideas that were criticised around data centres and data sovereignty have been walked back. They acknowledge they don’t have the expertise or the money to hire the expertise required, but that private data centre service providers do have these resources.”

“There is a provision, however, that data centre infrastructure used by government entities must be in-country. But this is sensible.”

The government taking note of stakeholders’ input and acting sensibly is very encouraging indeed.

The policy will impact a wide range of laws, including the Cybercrimes Act, the Electronic Communications Act, Popia, and the Minimum Information Security Standards Act. Regarding the level of competition in the cloud services industry, the paper makes particular reference to the Competition Commission and its governing law, the Competition Act.

“The Competition Commission shall consider reviewing and potentially augmenting the Competition Act in relation to the data and cloud market, where empirical evidence indicates that the current law is inadequate to address competition issues in these markets,” said the document.

However, Dyer said that the policy document is a representation of the government’s intended direction and is not binding on any regulatory body. When making a decision, she said, regulators may decide to go in a different direction, but they would have to deliberate on that and give reasons explaining the diversion from the official policy.

“Better implementation of current legislation and a rationalisation of resources is what is important.”

The policy also proposes that the government increases R&D spending “with a focus on supporting innovation and technology development”. According to the policy, this will be done by ensuring the Technology Innovation Agency is “adequately funded and capacitated to support South African innovators”.

This is good news to innovators like RSAWEB who offer the best in connectivity and hosting products for both businesses and individuals. Whether it is ADSL, Fibre, Data or Cloud solutions that you are looking for, RSAWEB has a solution to suit your needs and budget.

[source:techcentral]