Cloud to dominate by 2020

There is a steady swing in the balance from on-premise to cloud solutions, says Yossi Hasson, MD of on-premise and cloud solutions provider Synaq.

He adds that companies which have 'taken the leap' by moving certain applications to the cloud are quickly seeing the benefits in terms of cost savings and increased efficiencies, and returning to investigate what other applications they can move to the cloud.

“It just makes more sense,” says Hasson.

He cites an example of business incubator Raizcorp, which was faced with e-mail reliability issues and the need to collaborate better across its branches.

The company considered an on-premise solution, which would have cost around R257 000 up-front, and require building new servers, acquiring additional software and increasing maintenance, he says.

This solution would have required a three-month engagement, notes Hasson. It decided to move to the cloud instead, saving 86% of its up-front costs and roughly R500 000 a year in other costs. This move was achieved in one weekend and instantly gave the company access to the increased functionality it wanted, Hasson says.

“In addition to saving a great deal of money, their IT manager is now free to focus his energies on strategic projects, rather than non-strategic applications.”

According to Hasson, enterprises do still have reservations about moving to cloud-based computing, with one of their main concerns being the cost of bandwidth.

However, he points out: “Bandwidth costs are coming down, making cloud computing more and more affordable. And if you weigh up the costs of additional bandwidth versus the savings you will see when moving to cloud computing, it still makes more financial sense to move to cloud computing.”

Hasson is one of the speakers at the upcoming ITWeb Virtualisation and Cloud Computing conference, being held at The Forum, in Bryanston, on 21 and 22 July.

For more information on the event, click here.