How to get over the AI hype hangover
The early excitement around generative artificial intelligence (AI) is giving way to a more clear-eyed assessment of its real-world impact and potential. Where the technology once felt akin to magic, it’s now being tested against practical business outcomes, and is...
AI governance without complexity: A business leader’s guide
There is a version of AI governance that looks like a hundred-page policy document, a steering committee and a six-month implementation roadmap. Most businesses do not need that version, writes Senzo Mbhele, MD of Cloud On Demand. What leaders actually want is...
I found my dragon – then they locked Excalibur back in the stone
By Barry Buck and Claude Opus 4.8 - Last week I confessed to pulling a Mythos-class sword from the stone and using it to trim my hedges — and promised that if the dragon ever came, it would find me well practised and the blade sharp. Reader, the dragon came. They...
Navigating the frontier of agentic AI
Every year at Cisco Live US I spend time with the people who keep the world running, writes Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer at Cisco. The IT teams behind hospitals, power grids, banks, airlines, and governments. The operators who get paged at 2am. The...
TCO is not about cheaper compute but about delivering fewer surprises
In almost every boardroom conversation in southern Africa, the cloud is framed as a cost discussion. Questions like whether it is cheaper or more efficient are common. Those are valid concerns. But they are not the questions that determine whether a cloud strategy...
I pulled Excalibur from the stone and used it to trim my hedges
By Barry Buck, with Claude Fable 5 - This week Anthropic handed the village folk the keys to the armoury. Claude Fable 5 – a Mythos-class model, the tier whose legend of being too dangerous to release precedes it – is now generally available for a limited period. Its...
Blue Pearl accelerates enterprise modernisation with IBM Bob
IBM today is announcing a significant milestone in how Blue Pearl is leveraging IBM Bob, an agentic AI-powered software development partner, to accelerate modernisation of their legacy Java codebase. The agentic AI helps increase engineering productivity, strengthen...
The VPN era is ending, and businesses need a cleaner access model
The VPN has done its job for a long time. The problem is that many businesses are still asking it to solve a problem it was never designed for. VPNs were developed for a simpler access model than the one businesses now have to manage. By Warren Gordon, BU executive at...
Digital laggards will lose ground
The digital economy is entering a tougher phase, and businesses that fail to modernise properly risk losing ground. Future growth will depend less on simply having digital tools in place and more on whether organisations can turn connectivity, trust and customer...
Three steps to AI readiness for SA businesses
AI deployments do not usually fail on the technology. They fail on what was already broken before the technology arrived: data that nobody fully trusts, governance that exists on paper but not in practice, and teams that were never brought along. For most...
Veeam adds operational privacy, AI governance for the agentic era
Veeam Software has announced new agentic AI capabilities for the Veeam DataAI Command Platform designed to help organisations operationalize governance at the speed and scale of modern AI systems. Organisations are navigating the most complex regulatory environment in...
Shadow AI is the new shadow IT – and financial institutes are sleepwalking into it
Someone at your institution is running a critical risk calculation from a laptop under a desk. You just don't know which one. That's not a hypothetical. At a major bank, compliance teams discovered approximately 36,000 systems operating across the business, many...