EDITOR ’ S NOTE
Greetings to the readers of Intelligent CIO Africa . Modernisation of the IT organisation is essential for African enterprises to embrace digital platforms , become agile , and scale their business without compromising on user or customer experience . According to Netesh Maharajh at ALNET Technologies , African enterprises face multiple challenges from legacy solutions that impact their business operations and processes .
Scalability is by far the most important factor for any growing African business which hinders business expansion and adaptability to market changes by not implementing newer IT applications and IT infrastructure .
Security based on legacy IT applications and IT infrastructure becomes susceptible to security breaches and cyber threats . On-going maintenance costs with outdated systems and infrastructure can be expensive from a resource and technology perspective especially with the availability of advance technology platforms .
Legacy IT systems can be very rigid which makes it difficult for the business to implement new processes or innovate leading to inefficiencies in the business operations and lack of integration capabilities with modern technologies . Poor user experience plays another important role , which ultimately affects the staff ’ s satisfaction , performance and productivity .
In this month ’ s cover feature we present how not-forprofit Reach For A Dream Foundation was compelled to implement a cloud based financial solution to move from manual reconciliations to more integrated and automated ones . ALNET Technologies , a Sage Platinum Business Partner , was selected by Reach For A Dream to implement Sage Intacct , a best of breed cloud financial software solution .
Post implementation , Sage Intacct has improved processing efficiencies across multiple areas for The Reach For A Dream Foundation . This was from processing donor invoices , tracking dream costs for dreamers at branch level and reducing the challenges around bank reconciliations . The pre-defined reports and dashboards provides real-time financial data overview on one screen with drill-downs .
Turn these pages to read more about the digital transformation that is taking place across Africa .
With increasing corporate profits and growing IT investments into digital transformation , the African continent has come under the cyber landscape of global and regional threat actors . What are some of the productive and cost effective cyber security practices that African enterprises can adopt to sustain corporate resilience ? Executives from Duxbury Networking , In2IT , and Commvault , share their recommendations .
Wishing you the best of business success in the month ahead .
Arun Shankar Managing Editor arun @ lynchpinmedia . com
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