By: David C Howell - Regional Sales Director at ManageEngine South Africa

Twenty years ago, managing enterprise IT in South Africa was a considerably more contained job. Most employees worked from an office, using desktops connected to a corporate network, while applications and data largely sat on company infrastructure. When something went wrong, IT teams had a more defined environment to troubleshoot.

Then, as mobility began taking shape, this model began to change considerably, as laptops and smartphones allowed employees to work beyond a fixed desktop. This meant that IT teams had to manage software, configurations, and access across devices that could move between networks and locations. Over time, improved connectivity and remote and hybrid working extended the enterprise technology environment far beyond the physical office.

Cloud computing then changed not only where people could work, but where the infrastructure and applications they relied on could reside. Organisations could consume computing resources and software without owning every underlying system, while software-as-a-service platforms added a growing number of externally hosted applications to the technology estate.

PwC's 2025 Africa Cloud Business Survey found that 86% of surveyed African organisations now run workloads across multiple cloud providers. Yet around half (53%) have managed to modernise legacy systems in selected parts of their organisation and fewer than one in three (29%) have already done so across many parts of their organisations. Similar numbers appear for modernising data architecture for cloud-based analytics, with 33% already implementing it in many parts of their organisation, and 52% having implementing it only in some parts of their organisation. Rather than completing a straightforward transition from old infrastructure to new, IT teams are increasingly managing different generations of technology simultaneously.

From IT support to business resilience

That complexity has implications beyond day-to-day IT operations. It has also expanded the attack surface organisations need to protect. PwC’s Digital Trust Insights Surveyfound that 63% of South African business and technology leaders rank cyber risk investment among their top three strategic priorities. Yet only 28% of South African organisations spend significantly more on proactive measures such as monitoring, assessments, and testing than on reactive measures such as incident response and recovery.

As the traditional network perimeter becomes less defined, visibility into devices, identities, and data has become essential to both IT management and security. The POPI Act has further strengthened this responsibility, requiring South African organisations to take reasonable technical and organisational measures to safeguard personal information. Data governance is therefore becoming an increasingly important part of the IT mandate.

A broader IT mandate

The expanding technology environment has also broadened the role of the IT department. Two decades ago, the priority was largely operational: keeping systems available, resolving issues quickly, and ensuring employees could work without disruption. Those responsibilities remain, but IT teams are now also expected to support digital transformation, protect organisational data, and help businesses remain resilient as their dependence on technology grows.

AI and automation represent the next stage in this journey. Automation can reduce the manual work that once characterised IT management, while AI can help teams interpret operational data, identify anomalies, and respond to issues faster. But making effective use of these technologies also depends on having visibility across an increasingly distributed environment.

For IT teams, this means being able to see the technology environment as a whole and connect the management of operations, endpoints, identities, and security rather than treating each as an isolated function. South Africa’s IT environment looks remarkably different from the one businesses were managing two decades ago. The next 20 years will undoubtedly bring another wave of change, and the challenge for IT teams will be ensuring that their ability to manage it evolves just as quickly.