EDITOR’S QUESTION
WHAT ARE THE
BENEFITS OF USING
AN ON-PREMISE
DATA CENTRE?
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I
t is now a year since Microsoft
launched its two Azure data centes in
Johannesburg and Cape Town, but what
was once considered an integral part of any
organisational strategy, the public cloud may
no longer be the darling of South African
decision-makers. With many rushing their
transition into this environment and making
mistakes along the way, companies are now
taking the learnings and refocusing on a
hybrid approach. And according to Nutanix,
it is this hybrid cloud focus that will drive
investments over the next five years.
The global findings of Nutanix’s second
global Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey
and research report found that 84% of
respondents in South Africa (compared to
73% globally and 71% across EMEA) are
either moving public apps back to on-
premise environments or planning to do so.
“The local and global results of the report
speak directly to what we are seeing among
customers within the country,” said Paul
Ruinaard, Regional Sales Director at Nutanix
Sub-Saharan Africa.
“While the cloud has not moved off the
business agenda completely, SA customers
are looking at how they can better modernise
their on-premise data centres. In some
instances, they are scaling back their use of
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INTELLIGENTCIO
public and hybrid clouds. This is supported by
a stated 9% decrease in public cloud usage
by local respondents and the staggering
amount who are making the move back on to
their private IT infrastructure.” making than anywhere else in the world.
Most local respondents (76%) said that cost
advantages were the number one factor
fuelling their decision-making as compared
to 53% of global and EMEA countries.
Many of the repatriated apps are headed for
traditional data centres rather than private
clouds. In a reversal of its 2018 Enterprise
Cloud Index profile, the country upped its
reported data centre penetration by 48%
to 72% last year, catapulting it into the
highest global data centre usage bracket.
By contrast, only 25% of local respondents
reported using private cloud, the lowest
across all countries except Taiwan (21%)
and Hong Kong (23%). “It is no wonder that cost is a major factor
when considering that nearly 53% of SA
companies reported being over budget
with their public cloud spending in 2019,
a 12-percentage point increase over the
previous year,” said Ruinaard.
“The fact that local customers are eyeing
the cloud with more caution is in part due
to how the costs of scaling workloads to
the cloud caught many of them unaware,”
added Ruinaard.
“Security is also a concern, as is
performance, and lastly application
delivery. The data by no means states that
companies are halting their cloud journey,
but instead they are approaching it more
maturely and cautiously.”
This is indicative of how cost plays a far
more important role in SA cloud decision-
“When compared to the 35% global
average, managing cloud cost must
therefore become an organisational priority.”
Even though the move away from the public
cloud is evident, there remains a significant
disconnect between what local businesses
deem the ideal IT infrastructure and what
they are deploying today.
SA IT professionals generally agree with
their worldwide peers that hybrid cloud
represents the ideal and most secure IT
operating model.
Still, respondents here reported the third
lowest penetration of hybrid clouds today
(6%) after Japan (3%) and Switzerland
(4%). Furthermore, SA’s hybrid usage
dropped by nine points in 2019.
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