Cloud migration: AWS, Azure or Google Cloud — how to choose?

Cloud computing has become a strategic lever for businesses across the sub-region. According to a recent survey, more than 60% of West African organisations plan to accelerate their cloud adoption over the next three years in order to reduce infrastructure costs and speed up their time to market. Yet with so many offers available — AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — choosing the right platform is often a headache. That is exactly the mission of SEPTYS's Cloud Value Engineering programme: turning this complex choice into a clear decision aligned with business objectives.

AWS, Azure, Google Cloud: the three giants in detail

AWS, the market pioneer, stands out for the maturity of its catalogue: more than 200 services covering compute, storage, data and artificial intelligence. It is often favoured for its community, its documentation and its highly sought-after certifications such as SAA-C03, SOA-C02 and the DevOps Engineer path.

Microsoft Azure is a natural fit for organisations already equipped with the Microsoft ecosystem. Native integration with Active Directory, Office 365 and .NET tools makes it the preferred choice of large enterprises and the public sector. The AZ-900, AZ-204 and DP-100 certifications quickly demonstrate the skills growth of teams.

Google Cloud, for its part, excels in data engineering, machine learning and open source, particularly through Kubernetes. For companies with a strong data analytics agenda, it is a serious alternative, as the Google Cloud ACE certification programmes attest.

The conclusion is clear: there is no universal "best cloud", only a cloud suited to each context. The choice must be based on objective criteria: workloads, governance, budget, internal skills and regulatory requirements.

Digital sovereignty, a major issue for the region

In West Africa, the question of data localisation has become strategic. Digital sovereignty is not simply a technical choice: it concerns regulatory compliance, business continuity and user trust. SEPTYS supports its clients in arbitrating between public cloud, private cloud and hybrid solutions, paying attention to region localisation, data reversibility and contractual service-level commitments (SLAs).

Migrating to the cloud is not decreed: it is designed, planned and executed as a full-scale enterprise project.

FinOps: keeping costs under control over time

FinOps — a contraction of Finance and Operations — has become an essential discipline for anyone wishing to avoid budget drift. Our consultants help finance and technology teams build a culture of continuous cloud cost optimisation:

• governance of resources and access rights;
• definition of budgets and consumption alerts;
• instance reservation for predictable workloads;
• automated scaling according to activity;
• FinOps dashboards for shared visibility.

A migration without service interruption

Migrating without disrupting operations is the promise of SEPTYS's Cloud Value Engineering programme. Our approach relies on an audit of the existing environment, a wave-based migration plan, non-regression testing and a running-in phase. The goal: zero critical interruption, controlled cutovers and a team trained to operate the new infrastructure.

Your cloud roadmap in three steps

The path SEPTYS offers every client to achieve a successful migration.

• 1. Audit and scoping
• 2. Wave-based migration
• 3. Continuous optimisation

Whether you are a Senegalese SME making its first migration or a regional group consolidating infrastructures, our AWS-, Azure- and Google Cloud-certified experts support you from strategy to operations.

Contact us today for an initial analysis of your environment, or join our Cloud Computing and DevOps courses (AD05-CC-SD and AD01-AUT-DEV) through the SEPTYS Academy programme.