The majority of South African companies looking to host their IT infrastructure in the cloud are stuck in the first phase of their cloud journey because they struggle with process change.
This is according to Sandra Hamilton, VP of EMC Consulting, speaking during an EMC round table event held last week at Monte Casino. She said a hybrid cloud model increases automation and agility while reducing operational IT costs.
A key point revealed at the round table was that cloud computing is not only about the technology, but also about aligning people and process in an organisation's journey to the cloud.
“Hybrid cloud computing develops highly agile businesses that are able to make decisions quickly and react rapidly. It also offers customers lower IT spend than either pure public cloud or pure private cloud,” Hamilton explained.
“Another trend we're seeing is the community cloud where common businesses choose to share their IT assets in a non-competitive way in order to share existing infrastructure and take advantage of best practices.”
According to Hamilton, businesses should consider economic factors of moving to the cloud, trust in the third-party cloud provider and determine whether it is feasible to put business data in a public or private cloud environment.
Chad Sakac, EMC VP of VMware technical alliance, said the emergence of big data has resulted in IT infrastructure being considered a commodity. “More businesses are moving their IT where it best serves the business in order to invest more on innovation and less on operational costs.”
He added: “In 2010, 30% of companies were looking to implement some kind of cloud service, and now we see another 30% are already on that journey.”
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