Global Micro and its long-term partner Microsoft are strengthening their partnership with plans to support organisations in transitioning to a hybrid cloud solution.
The companies are leveraging the benefits of a South African service provider offering a local instance of Windows Azure services.
Demetri Petropoulos, head of business development at Global Micro, says: "Our dual data centre environment has allowed us to provide the only instance of Windows Azure Services within our region, and has also given us the ability to offer a managed replicated virtual infrastructure for high availability and disaster recovery solutions."
He notes research companies say roughly 50% to 60% of Web-based apps are great candidates to move to cloud.
Petropoulos says as companies move down their stack of applications and get into the mission-critical ones, a much lower proportion of these apps are moving into any kind of hosted cloud service.
"The less mission-critical and the more bespoke the application, the easier it is to move it to a cloud environment," he said.
Nick Keene, senior cloud sales manager, Microsoft, says: "Microsoft's licensing mobility allows enterprise customers to consume locally hosted infrastructure-as-a-service, which is extremely beneficial for enterprise customers as they typically have significant investments in IT infrastructure and facilities.
"Although the efficiencies of migrating to the cloud are generally justified, the risk and cost associated with migrating critical applications to the cloud can be significant, and if done without a clear strategy, it could complicate the IT environment rather than simplify it. Enterprises are, thus, more likely to have a hybrid private cloud approach, whereby they extend some of their workloads into a private cloud environment ? still secure and isolated."
He adds the hybrid cloud transitioning strategies available in the industry today need to be equipped with capabilities that address complex solutions catering to particular enterprise requirements.
These requirements can range from providing connectivity to the data centre, to synchronising the enterprise's user identities across the cloud and providing backup solutions with enterprise-grade encryption and recovery assurance, he concludes.
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