The recent\nlaunch of multinational data centres in South Africa and the pipeline of new\nones arriving in the next few years will fundamentally change the cloud market\nin the country. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ralph Berndt, Sales and Marketing Director at Syrex, believes organisations who have been previously undecided about the cloud have now woken up to its potential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cEven though the\npressure to migrate [to the cloud] has been significant when looking at the\ncompetitive environment, traditionalists have been holding off to make the\nshift for a number of reasons,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cConsiderations\naround compliance and security in addition to the speed of access were\nconcerns. However, these have now been addressed thanks to local Azure access\nbeing available.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More recently,\nthe availability of Office 365 on South African data centres has given further\nimpetus for a move towards an online environment. Companies are now looking at\nmigrating their applications, services and security to a more operational\nsolution in the cloud as opposed to investing in on-premise offerings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhile there\nwill always be those organisations who will have elements of on-premise\nsolutions in place, hybrid environments will become more commonplace,\u201d added\nBerndt. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThese provide\nthe best of both worlds and still give the peace of mind needed for those\ndecision-makers who want to maintain their perceived control over their data.\nHowever, with the cyber threat landscape rapidly evolving, the investment\nneeded to effectively protect on-premise data will become unaffordable to many.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The past few\nmonths have seen several companies testing the waters when it comes to the\ncloud by migrating things such as email, enterprise resource planning\napplications, customer relationship management applications and file sharing.\nThis provides a good way to experience the benefits of the cloud first-hand\nwhile still leaving some mission-critical systems in an on-premise environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOnce the\nperformance and efficiency benefits are realised, then discussions turn to\nmoving more strategic systems to the cloud,\u201d said Berndt. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHowever, it\nmust be remembered that despite the availability, security and cost benefits in\ngoing the online route, data still needs to travel from the company to the data\ncentres. This is where a shared responsibility approach becomes crucial.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This entails an\norganisation taking responsibility for the security of its data while in an\non-premise setup as well as in getting it to the data centre. The service\nprovider can manage all aspects around security when the data is there, but it\nhas very little influence in safeguarding it on the journey unless this has\nbeen scoped and designed correctly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCybersecurity solutions that cater for both the on-premise and online environments are becoming increasingly important and relevant in this digitally-driven market,\u201d said Berndt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWith data\nprotection being a fundamental aspect of all businesses these days,\norganisations must have the assurances that this most valuable asset and\nintellectual property is kept safe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Berndt feels\nthat local data centres have now provided the spark necessary to drive a\ncloud-first approach from both security and data availability perspectives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCustomers have\nbeen looking towards cloud solutions that have historically been beyond reach\ndue to latency and distance,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWith Azure\nbeing localised, there is now more of a drive to build applications into a\nplatform-as-a-service environment on hyper-scale. This will extend to security\nand protecting data as well as maintaining reliable access to that data. These\nare exciting times for the cloud market in all of Africa and all organisations\nwould do well to embrace this opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The recent launch of multinational data centres in South Africa and the pipeline of new ones arriving in the next few years will fundamentally change the cloud market in the country. Ralph Berndt, Sales and Marketing Director at Syrex, believes organisations who have been previously undecided about the cloud have now woken up to its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":27979,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4950,182,46,6,19,9059,13,262],"tags":[620,388,41,733,2110,5732,453,1804],"class_list":["post-27977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","category-cloud","category-data-centres","category-insights","category-regional-news","category-south-africa","category-top-stories","category-used","tag-azure","tag-cybersecurity","tag-data-centres-2","tag-data-protection","tag-office-365","tag-ralph-berndt","tag-south-africa","tag-syrex"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27977"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27988,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27977\/revisions\/27988"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}