Johannesburg, 22 Jan 2013
In order to help local companies cut data centre demand and shift IT infrastructure capital expenditure to a short-term, pay-per-user model, IT solution provider Datacentrix has introduced its cloud mailbox offering.
Says Jan Dry, CTO and head of consulting at Datacentrix: "There is no doubt that the workplace, as we know it, is changing. With an increasingly demanding environment driven by the rise of the cloud, the consumerisation of IT, escalating infrastructure costs and complexity, as well as a mobilised, multigenerational workforce, organisations are expected to provide anywhere access to employees' essential applications, while also maintaining corporate security and data integrity.
"Physical office space is expensive, and so, more and more employees are starting to work remotely. In fact, according to Gartner, 84% of organisations today have some form of remote workforce. Not only this, but information workers are starting to use their own devices for work. Forrester says 15% of information workers use at least three connected devices, operate from a minimum of three different locations and use more than seven applications for business."
Dry states that this new, multigenerational group of employees is also not happy with just e-mail access, they want to be able to use social networking sites at work too.
"As companies battle to keep up with these demands, they are spending ever increasing amounts on infrastructure. In fact, Forrester also states that around 70% of IT budgets are being spent on maintaining inflexible and siloed data centre equipment.
"We believe, though, that these new pressures mean IT staff needs to change tactics, focusing on high level, business-changing applications rather than the nuts and bolts of infrastructure. The key is to provide access and services to any device at any time to employees, while also freeing up IT resources. This is something that can be achieved by opting for a cloud service with predictable costs and the requisite service level agreements (SLAs) in place, that will allow you to remain in control and be more productive."
The Datacentrix mailbox in the cloud offering will give businesses the opportunity to move away from in-house legacy systems to state-of-the-art infrastructure and services - including a Tier 3+ data centre and the first Security Operating Centre (SOC) of its kind within the EMEA region.
The service offering consists of Microsoft Exchange and Lync technologies, and will provide access from PCs, tablets and phones with flexible per user/per month billing. Companies can choose which users' e-mails should be archived, giving them the flexibility to comply with legal requirements, while at the same time reducing costs. Secure and reliable, the Datacentrix cloud is proactively managed by the company's SOC and is compliant to privacy practices, following global and local regulatory standards for data handling and transfer.
The cloud services self-service portal provides different identity options for businesses, including full support for single sign-on with the cloud, and granular, role-based access for client administrators, partners and end-users. It also delivers enterprise-grade support, featuring a self-service health dashboard that provides current information on the service status accessible on the Web and 24x7 online and phone support.
Furthermore, the company can provide a hybrid environment, with flexible workload and user migration, all covered within a single licensing agreement.
"E-mail services is a natural starting point for Datacentrix, following the launch of our cloud offering earlier this year," explains Dry. "We have plans in place to launch our 'infrastructure as a service' and 'platform as a service' offerings later in 2013."