Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 48 | Page 29

EDITOR ’ S QUESTION

The current global situation and the weak economy just gave cloud adoption a boost – including the Middle East and Africa ( MEA ). One of the things that we are seeing is that enterprises are looking at all of their spending and that includes IT , so they want to ensure that technology spending is driving the most business value . One thing that ' s come out of the current crisis and into the post-COVID world is a renewed emphasis on Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery . We cannot have those discussions without service providers and cloud infrastructure because it enables those things to happen .

We live in an era that is rapidly developing with the improvements in digital technology and is underpinned by the highly proliferating technologies and based on cloud computing concepts . Artificial Intelligence , the Internet of Things , and Machine Learning has changed the way of everything . At present , consumers are demanding the most secure , real-time , intuitive , and mobile or web-based digital services . In today ' s digital era , data is everything . It is the most valuable asset of any organisation and without data , an organisation is paralysed . It can no longer make sound decisions and becomes a liability . Therefore , cloud data management is critical for any organisation . Proper management of data that includes accuracy , organisation and storage , will contribute to its growth .
According to a recent Cohesity ' s survey on 500 plus IT senior leaders , the need to fill these gaps is critical , given the more challenging economic climate and associated downward pressure on budgets . IT cannot afford to spend 40 % or more of its time maintaining inadequate infrastructure at the expense of more strategic projects that would help support the business . Data is well known to be a differentiating asset in the digital age . Still , few organisations can fully reap the value of their data today . Whether large or small , enterprises have travelled a long journey to move to cloud technology to manage their resources in a better way . At present , cloud technology is dominating the landscape across development and infrastructure . While the traditional life cycle was still a massive challenge for the organisations to deal with , and the critical business drivers for every industry may vary , different organisations ' business criteria are also other . In such circumstances , modern cloud technologies can be the best because the continuum of cases is broad , ranging from data-intensive . The use of virtual machines , containers or serverless as a default system can be the right choice . As one of the most important things is being used for customer services currently is the use of SaaS-based systems . SaaS models have proven themselves with salesforce in the enterprises . The chief point of the SaaS model is the need to get and run infrastructure at scales that can divert the core business purpose for an enterprise , and this provides such portability and fidelity across different environments .
CIOs must think multi-cloud first because the multicloud strategy allows different businesses to choose , analyse and monitor other cloud services from various service providers . Each has unique characteristics ( pricing , features , location , uptime , bandwidth , certification etc ) that serve better in some aspects than others . It means that every of these cloud offerings has their specialties in which they can work in a better way , and by having all of them , they will be able to get the advantage of each . Given that the rapidly changing world of technology is transforming the familiar call of ‘ better , faster and cheaper ’ into business expectations , it will never be a surprise when any of the internal or external clients will read about Big Data ' s potential and use Artificial Intelligence or start to ask about the new ways to monetise their information . Managing Digital Transformation can be challenging and a bit complex , more precisely when the businesses or companies are operating on large legacy systems , but at the same time , these can be more advantageous for the organisations . Reimagining their managed services to integrate the digital and cloud world , respected companies need to define their strategic vision . p
LAURENT GARCIA , EMEA CLOUD BUSINESS LEADER , COHESITY
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