Demand for virtualised IT infrastructure is rapidly growing throughout East and southern Africa.
According to Brenton Halsted, CTO for infrastructure services company Silicon Sky, many African businesses are starting from the ground up with virtualised environments.
"We're seeing major demand for greenfields virtualisation in Africa," says Halsted. "Financial institutions launching retail banking services, for example, don't have decades' worth of old systems and design to accommodate, so they are able to make the most of all the benefits of virtualisation. It gives them a huge cost advantage."
Although connectivity is a problem that has long plagued the continent, it is no longer a major obstacle, says Halsted, with the situation having improved remarkably. "There is still some instability, but it's a lot better than it was. Things are workable. International bandwidth is available and there is a lot of competition in the market for last-mile service providers."
The drivers for the growing demand are numerous, including reduced risk, a wider pool of skills, ease of development and testing, and data protection, says Halsted. The fact that many businesses work across borders creates an extra need for data protection and backup, emphasises Warren Olivier, territory manager at Veeam.
"It's very typical to find a company that is headquartered in, say, Botswana, with operations in Uganda and Namibia, and infrastructure housed in SA," he says. "From both a compliance and an operational point of view, they need to be rigorous about protecting all their data and systems."
Because virtual environments can be managed remotely, virtualisation enables businesses to use resources and skills from across the globe, notes Halsted. "We can have a development team in India, working on a system in Johannesburg that's supporting a business in Kampala."
Halsted observes that customers are using virtual tools for data protection and business continuity, and to improve development and test environments. "[Virtualisation] provides a quick and easy way for software development teams to make and test system changes without posing any risk to operations," explains Olivier, adding that a virtual machine can be restored from backups in only a few minutes.
Above all, virtualisation reduces risk for businesses, concludes Halsted. "It's easy to add new virtual machines, allocate extra storage or processing power, or restore from a backup when a developer's code causes system issues - all without any risk to the business."
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