MTN Business, a division of MTN South Africa, has launched a pilot project for its cloud services, making it the first mobile network and services provider in Africa to adopt the ‘Cloud Service Brokerage Model’.
MTN Business said their cloud services will be targeted at small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) across the continent.
The Cloud Service Brokerage Model centralises access to services, where a third party, in this case MTN, acts as the single point of contact for customers. This eases the administrative burden for companies, where instead of dealing with multiple service providers, they now deal with one.
Farhad Khan, Executive for Enterprise Business at MTN Group, said the pilot will be carried out in six of MTN’s key markets in Africa – Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa.
Khan said: “A particular challenge facing small and medium-sized businesses in Africa is the high cost of IT software and hardware. This includes the licence fees. What MTN cloud services seek to do is enable SMEs to minimise these costs, and at the same time improve productivity and efficiency.”
MTN Business has identified a number of SMEs in these markets to trial its cloud services.
To make the services even more accessible, users will be able to pay for MTN’s cloud offering using their airtime or MTN Mobile Money. Payment for the services will be in the local currency of the different markets.
“We want our enterprise customers to focus on running their businesses knowing that their data is kept safely and securely.” concluded Khan.
