Global IT hardware price increases and longer lead times have accelerated South African businesses' migration to the cloud, says Casper van der Walt, Chief Cloud Officer at CipherWave.
“There have been significant price increases on hardware, with organisations paying two to three times more than they would have paid a year ago,” he says. “In addition, the lead times are much longer. Where customers were previously able to receive the infrastructure within eight to 12 weeks, it now takes three to six months if they are lucky. Demand is increasing amid a worldwide shortage of certain components, which makes it very difficult to do private cloud on a small scale, which a typical business would do.”
He says the cost increases and delays are hampering growth and innovation for many organisations and driving them to consider their cloud infrastructure options.
“CipherWave is enabling organisations to harness private or public cloud, hybrid cloud or multicloud, and get up and running much faster,” he says.
He notes that moving to CipherWave cloud infrastructure is not just an alternative to on-premises infrastructure – it’s an upgrade.
“Once they migrate, they benefit from the strength of our connectivity backbone and access to our other cloud products, like our backups and disaster recovery services,” he says. “We've got multiple offerings, scalability and multiple levels of resiliency, protection and security for those customers.”
Cloud à la carte
Van der Walt says CipherWave helps customers design cloud models that best meet their unique business needs and align with their budgets.
“Public cloud might be sufficient for some organisations. However, you might find that certain governance and compliance requirements prevent a business from running in the public cloud. You might need to run everything in a private cloud, or run only certain systems in a private cloud for compliance, and everything else in the public cloud to reduce cost,” he says.
“There might be services that you bolt on that live in the public hyperscaler clouds of Microsoft, AWS, Google or Huawei: we can bring that in and connect it all into a multicloud offering. And then you might find that hybrid is most appropriate for the business. Within our data centres, you could run some in private, some in public. Because we offer it all, you can choose where you want to run which services, based on how they function, the compliance around them, the cost of running them in the cloud and what protection and security is available to you wherever you are.”
He adds: “Even if customers want to retain some hardware on site, we can assist them, to scope it, secure and connect it with a best practice design, built with efficiency and cost saving in mind.”
Working with CipherWave reduces cost and complexity, and gives customers scalability, enhanced security and business resilience.
Van der Walt says: “They get access to our extensive skills and infrastructure, as well as all our other products: our backup products, our disaster recovery, our SD-WAN and our security offerings.”
He says migration is a key concern for many customers: “This is one of CipherWave’s particular strengths. We've been doing disaster recovery as a service for 15 years, so we have extensive experience relevant to cloud migrations. Over the years, we have built all the tools, solutions and expertise to make the migrations secure and seamless.”
Van der Walt emphasises: “For us it's not just about bringing your data into the cloud and hosting your data. There's a non-negotiable in our business and that is to protect your data and your infrastructure. This is why we've got multiple backup and DR products, with data stored immutably and off site for five years for compliance. We also offer an additional isolated data protection plan for another layer of protection where we'll give you immutable backups and another set of immutable backups that are readily available for DR. This offers you the best of both worlds and meets virtually any audit requirements.
“If customers are unsure about what they need to do to replace their hardware, what cloud model they should adopt or what hypervisor to choose, they can speak to us. We run major technology stacks and we've got experience to support customers across all of them,” he concludes.
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