Whether or not an enterprise should deploy cloud to keep ahead of competitors is no longer up for debate - the issue is rather how businesses can extract the most value from their migration.

This is according to Andre Schoeman, executive for line of business at Jasco Enterprises, who spoke at the ITWeb Cloud Summit in Midrand this week.

He said s companies making the journey onto cloud are now concerned with maximising the potential of cloud computing.

"We've definitely moved past the point where it is a discussion of if or when we do cloud. It is more a consideration of how we implement and how we go ahead with this. It is, thankfully, no longer a question of should we or could we. The question of whether it is a good idea has passed."

Mohammed-Shoaib Dawood, Cloud Services Lead at IBM said deriving maximum value from cloud technologies is about including all the different components like IoT, analytics, artificial intelligence and blockchain.

"All of these put together will drive the transformation needed within a business and allow you to be innovative, to fail fast and transform fully. From a survey we conducted with more than 2000 C-suite executives in different industries, we found that out of all the companies that have successfully implemented cloud technologies 71% have generated new revenue. They have done this by expanding their cloud portfolio and their service portfolio which led to greater customer satisfaction and getting new business."

Dawood says top performing companies use cloud as a foundation and add other disruptive and emerging technologies as part of a broader strategy to drive new business opportunities.

"The fundamental consideration in building a cloud strategy should be how we are going to leverage cloud technology in order to get what we want out of it. Next is a look at the loss to your business if you do not do this, like a takeover by the competition and then to find which other cloud driven technologies you can deploy in order to adapt and become agile in the cloud."

Michael Needham, Senior Manager: Solutions Architecture at AWS agrees "The dominance of the hyperscale providers is now, for the first time, eating into the rest of the other players that provide cloud infrastructure. Some of the hyperscale providers who are working from a smaller base are in 100% growth rates and Amazon Web Services, which works off a larger base, is sitting at 45% year-on-year growth - and that was in the last quarter of 2017 which makes us a 20 billion dollar revenue business going into 2018."

Needham told ITWeb Africa that AWS intends to set up shop in Africa after Microsoft announced that it would deliver cloud services from data centres on the continent.

"I think Microsoft's investment is great for cloud in general and it's a big deal and it puts flames under all cloud providers. We have announced openly that we are coming to the African continent and we are all waiting for that date. You just have to watch this space. We do constantly re-evaluate where and how, but one thing we do know is that once we come in, it will be with full blown weight as we do not do watered down jobs and that takes a bit of time."