South African businesses that rely on cloud services now have a chance to see how their investment stacks up against the rest of the market, and to win R2,000 in cash. MyBroadband, the country’s leading broadband news platform, is running the South African Cloud Value Realisation Index 2026, a survey that asks for anonymous information about cloud usage, decision-making roles and the challenges firms face.
The index is essentially a scorecard. It measures whether organisations are turning the money they spend on cloud platforms into measurable business outcomes such as faster service delivery, lower operating costs or new revenue streams. In plain terms, it asks the question: are you getting the promised return from the cloud, or are you paying for capacity you never use?
Why the survey matters for small and medium enterprises
For many SMEs, the cloud is a way to compete with larger rivals without having to build expensive data centres. Yet the same flexibility can become a hidden cost if the tools are not aligned with business goals. According to MyBroadband, the index will highlight the biggest obstacles preventing full value capture, issues that often include skill shortages, unpredictable load-shedding schedules and the difficulty of integrating cloud services with legacy systems.
Understanding these obstacles can help a small retailer decide whether to move its inventory management to the cloud, or whether a hybrid approach, keeping critical functions on-premise while using cloud for peak demand, makes more sense. The findings will be published later in the year, giving firms a benchmark they can compare against, and potentially a roadmap for improvement.
Participation is straightforward. The survey takes only a few minutes and does not ask for any identifying details. Respondents are asked about the industry they work in, their role in cloud-related decisions and the current state of their organisation’s cloud investment. Once submitted, the respondent is automatically entered into a draw for a single cash prize of R2,000.
While the prize is modest, the real incentive is the data. MyBroadband says the index will be the most comprehensive view of cloud value realisation in South Africa to date. For an SME owner, that could mean access to sector-wide insights that were previously only available to large enterprises with dedicated analytics teams.
Industry observers have noted that cloud adoption in South Africa has risen steadily over the past few years, driven by the need for remote work capabilities and the pressure to modernise legacy IT stacks. However, a gap remains between spending and outcomes. A 2024 IDC report highlighted that many African firms still struggle to translate cloud spend into cost savings, often because they lack clear metrics or governance frameworks.
MyBroadband’s initiative therefore arrives at a time when the market is looking for concrete evidence of cloud ROI (return on investment). By aggregating anonymous responses, the index can surface patterns, for example, whether the finance sector is more successful at realising cloud value than manufacturing, or whether certain cloud providers consistently deliver better performance.
For the SME reader, the takeaway is simple: take a few minutes to fill the survey, and you may walk away with both a cash prize and a clearer picture of where your cloud strategy stands. Even if you do not win, the aggregated results will be published later, offering a free industry report that can inform budgeting and technology decisions for the next financial year.
The gap between cloud spending and measurable business value is a well-documented challenge across emerging markets, not one unique to South African firms. International research firms have repeatedly found that a meaningful share of enterprise cloud budgets goes toward capacity that is provisioned but never fully used, often because migration projects are scoped around technical feasibility rather than a clear before-and-after measurement of cost or speed. An index like the one MyBroadband is compiling gives local firms something most currently lack: a benchmark against comparable South African businesses rather than global averages that may not reflect local constraints such as data costs, latency to offshore data centres, and the load-shedding risk to always-on infrastructure.
MyBroadband’s own survey results, once published, will be the primary source for the actual figures behind this initial call for participation.
