South Africa's Cloud and Data Storage Readiness - A Policy Review

The South African government continuously strives to work on the development of legislations that protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of its citizen's information in the digital space. The contagion of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) led to a global lockdown that put governments in emergency mode. Post-COVID-19, the benefits of digitization became more noticeable. During the lockdown era cloud computing proved its effectiveness and efficiency in helping employees continue working even outside of their workstations. The objective of this paper is to scrutinize the current state of cloud data protection in the public sector within South Africa. The emphasis is placed on the draft National policy for cloud and data storage. This paper also makes recommendations to further strengthen and improve the current state of South Africa's cloud and data storage. It goes further to review existing legislations such as POPI, ECT, and cyber law acts and their relevance to the draft National Data and Cloud Policy. A proposal for a model that incorporates the cloud-shared responsibility model is presented and briefly discussed.