INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud
Opportunities abound in South
African cloud market
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T
he 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 potential.
“Even though the pressure to migrate [to the
cloud] has been significant when looking at
the competitive environment, traditionalists
have been holding off to make the shift for a
number of reasons,” he said.
“Considerations around compliance and
security in addition to the speed of access
were concerns. However, these have now
been addressed thanks to local Azure access
being available.”
More recently, the availability of Office 365
on South African data centres has given
further impetus for a move towards an
online environment.
Companies are now looking at migrating
their applications, services and security to
a more operational solution in the cloud as
opposed to investing in on-premise offerings.
“While there will always be those
organisations who will have elements
of on-premise solutions in place,
hybrid environments will become more
commonplace,” added Berndt.
“These provide the best of both worlds and
still give the peace of mind needed for those
decision-makers who want to maintain
their perceived control over their data.
However, with the cyber threat landscape
rapidly evolving, the investment needed
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INTELLIGENTCIO
to effectively protect on-premise data will
become unaffordable to many.” journey unless this has been scoped and
designed correctly.
The past few months have seen several
companies testing the waters when it
comes to the cloud by migrating things
such as email, enterprise resource planning
applications, customer relationship
management applications and file sharing. “Cybersecurity solutions that cater for both
the on-premise and online environments
are becoming increasingly important and
relevant in this digitally-driven market,”
said Berndt.
This provides a good way to experience the
benefits of the cloud first-hand while still
leaving some mission-critical systems in an
on-premise environment. “With data protection being a fundamental
aspect of all businesses these days,
organisations must have the assurances that
this most valuable asset and intellectual
property is kept safe.”
“Once the performance and efficiency
benefits are realised, then discussions turn to
moving more strategic systems to the cloud,”
said Berndt. Berndt feels that local data centres have
now provided the spark necessary to drive a
cloud-first approach from both security and
data availability perspectives.
“However, it must be remembered that
despite the availability, security and cost
benefits in going the online route, data
still needs to travel from the company to
the data centres. This is where a shared
responsibility approach becomes crucial.” “Customers have been looking towards cloud
solutions that have historically been beyond
reach due to latency and distance,” he said.
This entails an organisation taking
responsibility for the security of its data
while in an on-premise setup as well as in
getting it to the data centre. The service
provider can manage all aspects around
security when the data is there, but it has
very little influence in safeguarding it on the
“With Azure being localised, there is now more
of a drive to build applications into a platform-
as-a-service environment on hyper-scale.
“This will extend to security and protecting
data as well as maintaining reliable access
to that data. These are exciting times for
the cloud market in all of Africa and all
organisations would do well to embrace
this opportunity.” n
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