What the survey found
MyBroadband reported on Analytico's 2026 Business Technology Survey. The survey ran in September 2026 and drew 827 IT professionals and business leaders across South Africa. Only executives and managers who decide which ICT products their companies buy were counted. Respondents were asked which cloud provider they trust most for their company's needs.
The reported results:
- Google Cloud ranked first among South African SME, corporate and enterprise decision-makers.
- Microsoft Azure ranked second.
- AWS ranked third.
- Huawei Cloud was chosen as most trusted by only 2.66% of respondents.
- Oracle Cloud was also described as performing poorly, with no figure or exact rank published.
The accessible report doesn't show the chart's percentages for Google, Azure, AWS or Oracle. I won't estimate them.
What the survey does not measure
The headline says "dominate", but the survey asked about stated trust. It did not measure market share, revenue, deployed workloads or customer counts. A provider can be trusted by many decision-makers and still run fewer workloads than a rival. The reverse is also possible.
The published material doesn't include the questionnaire, the sampling method, a breakdown of respondents, a margin of error or year-on-year figures. MyBroadband says Google's trust has "increased significantly" since early 2024. Without prior-year data, that claim can't be checked from what's public.
The infrastructure timeline
Each provider's local presence began at a different time. The dates below come from the providers' own announcements and press materials.
| Provider | Local region milestone | Survey position |
|---|---|---|
| Huawei Cloud | Region unveiled at AfricaCom on 14 November 2018 | 2.66% |
| Microsoft Azure | General availability from Johannesburg and Cape Town, 6 March 2019 | Second |
| AWS | Africa (Cape Town) Region announced 22 April 2020 | Third |
| Oracle Cloud | Johannesburg region announced 19 January 2022 | Weak, no figure |
| Google Cloud | Johannesburg region ready for customers 31 January 2024 | First |
Some details from those announcements:
- Huawei said its South Africa region would start providing cloud services at the end of 2018. Huawei called itself the first provider operating a local data centre for cloud services in Africa. "First hyperscaler" is MyBroadband's wording, not Huawei's.
- Microsoft said it was opening its first enterprise-grade datacentres in Africa. It also noted that delivering Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365 from local datacentres supports data residency, security and compliance needs. At launch, Azure was the first of those services available. Office 365 was expected in the third quarter of 2019 and Dynamics 365 in the fourth.
- AWS's Cape Town region consists of three Availability Zones. It followed earlier AWS investments in South Africa, including Direct Connect in 2017 and CloudFront in 2018.
- Oracle announced its first cloud region in Africa on 19 January 2022. Oracle's documentation lists the region as af-johannesburg-1 with one availability domain.
- Google's launch post described the region as its first on the African continent. It brought Google's network to 40 regions and 121 zones, and it connects to the Equiano subsea cable.
One correction to the MyBroadband account: Google's own announcement called Johannesburg a full cloud region ready for customer use, not just a "point of presence".
Does local infrastructure explain the ranking?
The article implies that Google's Johannesburg region lifted its standing. The timeline doesn't settle that.
- Google arrived locally after Huawei, Microsoft, AWS and Oracle, yet it ranks first.
- Oracle had a Johannesburg region more than two years before Google, and it still did poorly. So infrastructure alone doesn't explain trust.
- The survey didn't ask respondents why they chose a provider. Possible drivers such as latency, compliance, pricing, partners, existing Workspace or Microsoft 365 use, or brand perception can't be separated.
The quote from Google's Niral Patel in the MyBroadband piece is a launch-day forecast from Google. It is not independent evidence about the survey outcome.
What this means for Windows and Microsoft shops
Azure's second place is strong, but the survey doesn't show how Azure performed within each segment. MyBroadband's claim that Microsoft is preferred by many large businesses is not backed by category-level data in the accessible text.
For IT admins and architects, the survey is a sentiment indicator. It is not a selection guide. Real decisions still turn on:
- Workload fit: whether the services you need are available in your chosen South African region.
- Data residency and compliance: your regulatory obligations and where data may live.
- Resilience: zone and region design, and recovery plans.
- Cost and licensing: including existing Microsoft agreements and hybrid benefits.
- Skills and integrations: identity, endpoint and management tools already in place, such as Entra and Intune.
- Multi-cloud reality: Nedbank, for example, described a hybrid, multi-vendor strategy when Azure launched locally.
Reading Huawei and Oracle fairly
Huawei's 2.66% is a low trust-preference figure. It isn't evidence of lost market share or customers. Oracle's weak showing comes with no number at all. Calling either provider "failing" goes beyond the evidence. Trust among decision-makers can lag behind real enterprise use, particularly for providers tied to specific workloads such as database estates.
Bottom line
South Africa's decision-makers say they trust Google, Azure and AWS most. That is a real signal for the market, and Azure's place in the top two is good news for Microsoft's local business. But the survey measures perception among 827 qualifying respondents. Anyone treating it as a market-share chart should wait for the full methodology and the category-level data.