Virtualisation offers a number of benefits within the African context, not only from a business perspective, but also as a possible solution to the continent's issues regarding geographic connectivity, educational hurdles, and challenges in the health, governmental and infrastructure sectors.
This is according to Sean Wainer, Citrix Systems' country manager for southern Africa, who points out that desktop virtualisation is moving away from being an emerging technology to becoming mainstream on the continent.
Analyst firm, Gartner forecasts the desktop virtualisation market will reach 65.7 billion unit sales, equivalent to about 40% of the worldwide business desktop market, in 2013.
Fellow research firm, Forrester notes that the high level of awareness among organisations regarding desktop virtualisation's potential to simplify migration to a new operating system such as Windows 7 is driving investment decisions.
Wainer points out that although Africa is experiencing significant growth, particularly in the sub-Saharan region, the geographical distance between major economic hubs, and the lack of access to copper- or fibre-based connectivity and basic infrastructure, is a challenge when it comes to connecting the African community.
“The scalability of virtualisation from a costing and connectivity point of view makes it the obvious answer to the question of how to connect remote parts of Africa to the rest of the world. It is widely known that a significant portion of the continent now has access to Internet connectivity through the use of second-and third-generation mobile networks.
For example, he explains, through the use of virtualisation, remote villages can gain access to an educational mainframe, which would allow teachers to plan classes, download new study material, track their students' progress, and discuss problems with other educators.
“By the same token, students might be able to use virtualisation to access school books, study for tests and exams, and be given assistance from teachers on the other side of the continent.”
Wainer also notes that from a healthcare perspective, doctors could use virtualisation to track and update patient records in far-flung or hard-to-reach areas, interpret medical data with the help of a centralised database, or give follow-up assistance and advice to villagers without ever being physically present.
Local and national governments in Africa could also benefit greatly from the application of virtualisation in daily processes, he adds.
“This would allow national government to monitor constituencies to ensure that productivity is being maintained, and even to stamp out corruption through the regular monitoring of financial records on a municipal level.”
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