Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 51 | Page 29

EDITOR ’ S QUESTION

The current global situation and the weak economy just gave cloud adoption a boost – including Africa . 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 .

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 .
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 enterprise space . 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
CIOs must think multi-cloud first because the multi-cloud strategy allows different businesses to choose , analyse and monitor other cloud services from various service providers .
each 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 .
Organisations are now under immense pressure due to the enormous amounts of available data and need to store customers ' records .
Once people had their misgivings about cloud technology , companies now realise how imperative and useful it is to operate with cloud tech in real-time . In the simplest terms , ‘ cloud ’ is a metaphor for the Internet . p
LAURENT GARCIA , EMEA CLOUD BUSINESS LEADER , COHESITY
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