Investment plans for disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity management (BCM) make up the biggest area of investment for 2014.
So said Lise Hagen, research manager, software and IT services Africa at IDC, speaking at the Cloud Resilience Executive Forum in Rosebank on Friday.
Highlighting the South African CIO data centre solution investment priorities for 2013 versus those of 2014, Hagen said the majority of CIOs have already invested in virtualisation technologies and are gradually moving into full private cloud deployment.
Service providers that focus on offering solutions targeting the data centre should incorporate private cloud, disaster recovery and business continuity management solutions into their portfolios and ensure they are able to provide advisory, integration and implementation services for all of these areas, she urged.
"The fact that there is still investment in new data centre facilities and expansion of existing facilities combined with private cloud investment presents an opportunity for 'cloud-in-the-box' solutions and converged infrastructure," said Hagen.
According to Hagen, the threat of disaster is a very real prospect in SA. Banks in SA have suffered millions of rands' in losses due to a variant of the Dexter virus - a piece of malware targeting point-of-sale, she noted.
"South African banks have also experienced service outages due to hardware and software failure," she added.
In regards to natural disasters, she pointed out that flash floods have hit the Western Cape in the past two years, prompting companies to invest in disaster recovery and data centres to negate the risk arising from operating a single storage location.
To Hagen, legacy approaches to business continuity management no longer meet business requirements.
"Benchmarking recovery objectives and cost of downtime are an essential first step in improving an existing programme. Build disaster recovery testing into a programme to ensure success in unplanned events. Virtualisation brings inherent benefits; choose the right, trusted partner."
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