Cloud On Demand and StorVault join forces on data backup and recovery in South Africa

The urgency for this partnership is underscored by a rapidly escalating threat landscape where the cost of a single data breach in South Africa now averages R44.2 million. 

Senzo Mbhele, managing director at Cloud On Demand. 

Cloud On Demand and StorVault, a South African cloud backup and recovery provider, have announced a partnership aimed at expanding data protection options for local businesses facing rising cybersecurity threats and tighter compliance requirements.

The deal combines Cloud On Demand's cloud delivery infrastructure with StorVault's backup platform, which is built to handle data loss scenarios such as ransomware, hardware failure, and the security gaps that come with remote and hybrid work setups.

The partnership arrives against a backdrop of worsening cyber risk in South Africa. According to industry data cited by the companies, the average cost of a data breach in the country has reached R44.2 million, while unplanned downtime can run between R2,000 and R7,000 per minute for local businesses.

A key argument driving the collaboration is that the backup tools bundled into platforms like Microsoft 365 were not designed with full enterprise recovery in mind. Features such as recycle bins and basic retention policies offer limited protection in the event of a ransomware attack, where restoring data to a specific point in time is often critical. StorVault positions its platform as an independent layer that stores immutable backups separately from the primary cloud environment, so that a breach of the main tenant does not necessarily compromise the backup.

"Organizations are under pressure to do more with less while facing rising cyber risk," said Senzo Mbhele, managing director at Cloud On Demand. "What stood out about StorVault was its practical, locally grounded approach to data backup and recovery. It solves real-world problems without adding unnecessary complexity, which is exactly what our partners are asking for."

Pricing is structured around local market conditions. Costs are billed in Rands on a pay-as-you-use basis, a model the companies say is intended to reduce exposure to foreign currency fluctuations that can make dollar-denominated cloud services unpredictable for South African firms. The arrangement also removes ingress, egress, and access fees.

"StorVault's platform is designed to close these critical gaps by providing independent, immutable backups for Microsoft 365 and server environments," said Rudi Jansen van Vuuren, general manager at StorVault. "This ensures that critical data remains recoverable even if the primary cloud tenant is compromised."