{"id":29799,"date":"2019-10-29T15:17:07","date_gmt":"2019-10-29T15:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/?p=29799"},"modified":"2019-10-31T12:30:09","modified_gmt":"2019-10-31T12:30:09","slug":"a-new-south-african-cloud-market-emerging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/2019\/10\/29\/a-new-south-african-cloud-market-emerging\/","title":{"rendered":"A new South African cloud market emerging"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Thanks to the arrival of Microsoft Azure data centres in South Africa, it is expected that more born-in-the-cloud organisations will start taking root here. And with smaller companies now finding it easier to migrate to an online environment, Dana Cinman, Product Specialist at Obsidian Systems, says these are exciting times for solution providers.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Previously, businesses were mainly moving their\nnon-critical applications to Azure given the regulatory restrictions around\nwhat data could be stored outside the country. Now, information can be stored\nlocally, nullifying the restrictions around the Protection of Personal\nInformation Act. Furthermore, the problem of latency has also been solved\nthanks to fast local connectivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given that smaller companies have fewer legacy\nsystems and less data to be moved via the Internet or virtual private networks,\nthey have an advantage over large enterprises. Even so, the biggest factor in driving\ncloud services is the ability to democratise IT services on a pay-as-you-use\nbasis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Price wars<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the local data centres up and running, there\nis hope that pricing will come down, making solutions even more affordable to\nthose organisations that are price-sensitive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, irrespective of whether data is hosted\nor stored in the cloud, there will always be a certain amount of risk involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Microsoft has the best resources available to ensure its environment is secure, local companies must still work with trusted business partners who can offer them an additional security layer for their data. This is especially important considering Microsoft (and most other cloud providers) will only protect organisational data to a point. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it comes to moving data from the local office (or devices) into the cloud, the company still has a responsibility to ensure it takes all possible precautions to keep it secure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The country is already on the verge of a cloud boom\nwith many business partners emerging whose sole focus is delivering solutions\nfor an online environment. Moreover, the ones that provide the likes of\ninfrastructure-as-a-service and migration to the cloud in addition to cost\noptimisation, cloud frameworks, and other facets, will be the ones most\nsuccessful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New approaches<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Companies have begun running more critical\nworkloads in parallel with their on-premise systems. Once a level of comfort\nhas been reached that the cloud provides a reliable enough platform to deliver\nthe expected results, this will turn into an online-only focus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the past several years, Microsoft has embraced\nopen source in the cloud using partners to help it modernise the DevOps\nprocesses driven by the containerisation of infrastructure and applications.\nThese also scale quickly given the availability of a significant number of\norchestration tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This will result in the availability of best-fit\nsolutions that carry with them no fear of vendor lock-in and interoperability\nof their environments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hybrid world<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And when it comes to a hybrid cloud approach,\ncompany strategies must start including the ability for multi-cloud management\ntools, easy billing, multi-tenancy, and self-service capabilities. Although\nmany are already using self-service capabilities, some businesses are opting to\nuse experts in these areas to prevent cloud wastage and unnecessary spend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As with most other technology approaches, cost\noptimisation is the key. To this end, consumption-based models are more\nefficient than capital expenditure especially when it comes to on-premise\nhardware.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many local customers have been waiting for\nannouncements from service providers regarding the launch of local data centres\nbefore embarking on their cloud journey and strategy. Now is the time to\nembrace this change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to the arrival of Microsoft Azure data centres in South Africa, it is expected that more born-in-the-cloud organisations will start taking root here. And with smaller companies now finding it easier to migrate to an online environment, Dana Cinman, Product Specialist at Obsidian Systems, says these are exciting times for solution providers. Previously, businesses […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":29800,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4950,182,46,6,399,19,260,9059,10675,262],"tags":[11553,41,291,532,429,176,433,11554,967,453],"class_list":["post-29799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","category-cloud","category-data-centres","category-insights","category-more-news","category-regional-news","category-regional-news-newsletter","category-south-africa","category-thought-leadership","category-used","tag-dana-cinman","tag-data-centres-2","tag-devops","tag-hybrid-cloud","tag-infrastructure-as-a-service","tag-microsoft","tag-microsoft-azure","tag-obsidan-systems","tag-protection-of-personal-information-act","tag-south-africa"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29799","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=29799"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29881,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29799\/revisions\/29881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}