Subscribe

Cloud meets IT challenges

By Suzanne Franco, Surveys Editorial Project Manager at ITWeb.
Johannesburg, 31 Jul 2015
Applying best practice is critical to the success of any cloud adoption strategy, says EMC Southern Africa.
Applying best practice is critical to the success of any cloud adoption strategy, says EMC Southern Africa.

IT departments are constantly facing new developments in this time of change as the need for mobility increases.

So says Charlene George, consulting sales director at EMC Southern Africa, who notes there is no doubt cloud implementation adds value to any organisation's IT requirements.

EMC, in partnership with ITWeb, is conducting an online Cloud Computing Survey to assess and determine the cloud landscape in SA and to establish what influences cloud investment decisions.

"The main objective of this survey is to gain an understanding of where South African enterprises are in their transformation to IT-as-a-service and areas where EMC Corporation can assist with this transformation," says George.

"A successful cloud strategy will enable IT to understand how decisions on cloud implementation can impact the business services, departments and individuals; and what the benefits are to an organisation, such as shorter time to market, cost benefits, faster provisioning time," she says.

She also points out applying best practice is critical to the success of any cloud adoption strategy.

"Any strategy must be able to adapt in response to technological advances. Understanding how to adjust the cloud strategy as business's needs change is also critical. Taken together, this ensures that an organisation's cloud adoption strategy stays up-to-date and is fit for purpose."

Decision time

She stresses problems can arise when an organisation has no strategy at all in place.

According to George, cloud computing and cloud storage have both crept into organisations in the form of 'shadow IT' and the use of public clouds.

"These solutions are often deployed on a small scale, ad hoc basis to answer particular business needs with no consultation with their IT department. This can put the organisation at risk due to the lack of control, security and governance," George advises.

She observes organisations of all sizes are increasingly using cloud in an organised, strategic manner, where business users know which public cloud services are authorised for use and which services are provided by the internal private cloud.

When asked of any new developments or significant changes that are taking place within the cloud computing sphere, George states the hybrid cloud is becoming more of a viable option for organisations by combining both public and private cloud services, and also in the area of big data and analytics in the cloud.

SaaS sparks action

According to an IDC research in SA sponsored by EMC, software-as-a-service (SaaS) is on the rise in the country, and is mainly driven by the need to ensure access to the latest application versions and to simplify the management of standard workloads such as e-mail and productivity suites.

"SaaS in the public cloud is being used for non-critical workloads. South African enterprises are using private cloud for their critical workloads. PaaS [platform-as-a-service] is being successfully utilised in public clouds by the developer community in SA. It's more difficult to measure how many of these implementations are still in the planning stage and how successful they have been. This is something that the cloud survey will help to determine," she says.

George believes South African companies are hampered from being on par with overseas companies in public cloud usage due to bandwidth issues (cost and performance in comparison with overseas countries) and security and legislative issues.

"There are few public clouds hosted in South Africa and many South African organisations are hesitant to store data outside of South Africa due to security concerns or legislative restrictions which prevent moving data outside of the country.

George states organisations are more on par with overseas companies in private cloud implementations, although one challenge in this area is the shortage of implementation skills in SA.

"The question for organisations in South Africa is not if, but when to move to cloud and what is the best deployment model (private, public or hybrid) to meet their business needs. EMC Corporation can assist in this journey and has an offering, the IT Transformation Workshop, to start organisations on the transformation journey.

The IT Transformation workshop accelerates an organisation's ability to deliver IT as a service and become a broker, or private and public cloud services. It helps an organisation identify gaps in the current state, identify where they want to be in the future, analyse the gaps and provide recommendations for the transformation," George concludes.

Click here to complete the survey and you can win 2x Toshiba Hard Drive & 1x Thule Backpack.

Share