Subscribe

Cloud moving to mainstream for SA municipalities

By Marilyn de Villiers
Johannesburg, 07 Dec 2016

Centurion-based cloud solutions provider XContent has joined forces with JSE-listed MICROmega subsidiary Sebata to enable South Africa's municipalities to boost service delivery by addressing their IT issues around tightening budgets, aging assets and infrastructure and a critical shortage of on-site expertise.

According to Sebata's IT manager, Gerrit Deyzel, IT leaders at the local government level are facing significant challenges as hardware, software and network equipment upgrades take longer and longer as municipalities slow their IT renewal cycles to preserve budget.

In addition, internal expertise in the latest IT developments is falling behind while the rise in the threat of cybercrime has added an additional layer of complexity to the numerous challenges already faced by municipalities in deploying and maintaining functional administrative and financial systems.

"As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult to for local authorities to keep current with the most efficient and cost-effective technology options," Deyzel said.

Sebata, which supplies local governments with professional services as well as a range of essential IT solutions ranging from ERP (enterprise resource planning) and other finance systems all the way through to water management applications, investigated efficient ways to address these challenges.

According to XContent's managing director, Danie de Lange, Sebata asked if there was a way to deploy the kind of ERP and financial systems its customers depended on in a more agile, scalable way - one that would speed up the time to market for a solution, and so get their customers up and running with new IT while minimising the drain on internal resources.

"We proposed the Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform as the best way to deliver services in the most convenient way for all parties. We started the migration of Sebata's applications to the cloud a year ago, beginning with extensive work around SQL Server," De Lange said.

The result is what XContent sees as a significant gain for the use and adoption of the cloud in the public sector and municipalities in South Africa.

For example, as a result of embracing the cloud, Sebata managed to very quickly on-board one of the biggest South African city administrations, speeding up the moment when it could start benefitting from its technology.

Asked why public sector organisations would want a cloud-based method of delivering functionality, Deyzel explained that the biggest single problem they faced was the way they're held back by old technology and legacy hardware infrastructure.

"A municipality wants to get an advanced administrative backend or financial system up and running, but too often simply does not have the infrastructure on which to deploy it. But now, thanks to our move to the cloud, our customers can implement solutions within days, where before this might have taken them six to 12 months," he said.

"This means municipalities can do what they need to - concentrate on their core business of service delivery - while we do all the worrying about the infrastructure, upgrades, support and, especially for this market, the online security aspects of the service."

Deyzel acknowledged that there had been some initial cloud concerns, but these had soon proven unwarranted.

"It wasn't all that long ago that there were questions around the use of the cloud," Deyzel said. "But with improvements in hosting capability, connectivity, affordability and protection, the cloud has proven to be a great option for our customers."

This was especially true around options like online disaster recovery, which is now a much more realistic option for municipalities than, for example, setting up a mirror site.

"For all these reasons, the cloud's a really good match for our market. It's a great way of delivering the truly end-to-end solutions our customers need for maximum efficiency and the very best digital public services to citizens," he concluded.

Share