CIOs and CEOs are under immense pressure to achieve operational efficiency, while paying attention to economics, regulations and compliance, delegates heard at a seminar held in Bryanston last week.
Consolidation provides the solution, according to Dimension Data Africa`s CTO, Alpheus Mangale.
Consolidation needs to be at the forefront of IT strategy to ensure agility, service availability, operational efficiency, and business reliability that leads to higher investor confidence, Mangale said.
He listed challenges as providing appropriate functionality to support business and opportunity, ICT being aligned with strategy, assurance of ICT availability, the use of ICT to gain competitive advantage, and providing ICT services cost-effectively.
"According to Gartner, operational efficiency and driving down costs was listed as the most important consideration by business, at 49%," he explained.
The solution for efficiency and driving down costs is network consolidation, he said. This form of network convergence allows for an increased architecture over a common infrastructure.
"It also leads to bandwidth consolidation as you will be able to support and optimise all critical applications," said Mangale.
"Consolidation greatly improves performance," explained Jeff Jack, CTO for network solutions at DiData SA. "Consolidation can be done at network, data centre, storage and operating system level."
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