Johannesburg, 02 Mar 2026
Enterprises in South Africa and across Africa are fast overcoming data hurdles that stood in the way of AI adoption, thanks to Google Cloud solutions and a new model for compliant, integrated data management by Digicloud professional services partner Synthesis.
Louis-Philip Shahim, Google Cloud Practice Lead at Synthesis, says the Synthesis data and analytics practice uses Google Cloud to rapidly build enterprise-grade data platforms that break down data silos and address security concerns.
“Our platform addresses a challenge that's been around for a long time – data in silos,” Shahim says. “For years, Synthesis has been really good at building the foundations to break down data silos for companies. With Google Cloud solutions, we have built accelerators or patterns that we've been able to redeploy across multiple customers for different use cases. The first one that we ever deployed took us about two weeks and now we can deploy a similar pattern into different regions in as little as three days.”
Shahim says key Google solutions that Synthesis deploys in its data platform are BigQuery – the autonomous data to AI platform that automates the entire data life cycle; Google’s Dataproc – a fast and fully managed cloud service for running Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop clusters; and Looker Studio – for interactive, collaborative reports and dashboards.
“With Gemini Enterprise on top of all of that, it’s transformative. Gemini Enterprise gives you the ability to connect into your existing systems. So you're putting AI on top of your existing data sources, which could be SharePoint, OneDrive or Google Drive, and you're giving people a knowledge base that is accessible to anyone in the company as a single source of truth. We're making it very specific to companies and their particular use cases and making sure that the data is cleaned and sanitised in a way that makes it useful from the very beginning,” he says.
“Our view is that if you build a good data platform and a core system that meets your business use case, and you put Gemini enterprise on top of that, nothing can stop you. You’ll always have good results with your AI.”
Addressing security and compliance
Security and compliance are also top concerns for enterprises moving to harness AI, Shahim notes. “Synthesis has had years of experience in multiple industries, including highly regulated sectors like financial services,” he says.
“We build secure, bespoke and compliant data platforms that meet each enterprise’s needs. For example, one of our clients is a global customer that must be compliant with different regulations all over the world. We've used our model to deploy a data platform in each region with all the security guardrails that they require to align with different regulatory requirements. With an analytics layer on top, we can allow data analysts and business users to access certain information for analysis.”
Africa’s enterprises move to Google
Shahim says the Synthesis data and analytics practice is seeing a surge in interest from enterprises across Africa, and expects to grow its business across the continent this year.
“There was some hesitation about Google Cloud until a few years ago, but now enterprises have realised that Google has really started to outshine the competition,” he says.
“Google Cloud has invested a billion dollars into the networking and infrastructure to bring Google's power to Africa, and has proven its security capabilities. So big corporates are taking Google seriously now.”
Google Cloud solutions and the Synthesis data platform are revolutionising business for Synthesis clients, Shahim says.
“We're basically re-imagining the whole business for them. It's a common thing across a lot of enterprises that businesses are run on one or two Excel spreadsheets that have become so large that people's laptops crash when they open them. We’ve taken that data and made it re-usable, giving anyone in the organisation access to the information they need to run the business,” he concludes.
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