EMC Southern Africa has appointed Amanda De Beer as regional manager of its Data Protection Solutions (DPS) business.
She replaces Sumash Singh, who recently joined data management solutions provider, CommVault, as SA country manager.
Previously, De Beer was an executive of Gijima's enterprise applications business unit, and had stints with Cisco in the Netherlands and SA, as well as with Microsoft. She holds two post-graduate Masters degrees in engineering and engineering management.
"It's a sincere privilege to join the EMC team and lead the DPS business. I am looking forward to working with and serving the DPS team, and playing a part in the drive to transform our hardware, software and services onto EMC's Hybrid Cloud Platform and beyond," De Beer says.
In an interview with ITWeb, De Beer said she is excited about the opportunity EMC sees in the local telco space and how the storage solutions giant can partner to drive hosted and off-premise offerings around data protection in SA.
"We are investing significantly in this area in terms of consultants and pre-sales to assist our customers with developing these offerings," she said.
"We understand the importance of partnerships to address the data protection market in SA; and our plans are to work very closely with our partners in the SADC [Southern African Development Community] region to build skills and invest jointly in skills development. This is a long-term goal but we would like to have 10 graduates skilled on data protection by the end of 2016."
She added big data, cloud and mobile uptake are bringing new challenges to the market, and from the recent Data Protection Index survey, it is clear organisations do not feel comfortable about where data is moving and how data can be protected in this new realm.
"Data loss and downtime are expensive and happening in SA, with the majority of businesses feeling the pain. New workloads - cloud, big data, mobile and exploding data volumes - will continue to put pressure on data protection."
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