Johannesburg, 17 Sep 2015
"Many South African companies have been slow to move to the cloud, citing concerns around data sovereignty, security, control of data and even business continuity," says Itumeleng Kobedi, product manager of Group Cloud Services at MTN.
But the wave of load shedding, which shows no signs of ending in the foreseeable future, underlines the fact that there are even greater risks to data and businesses if they do notmove to the cloud, says Kobedi.
"Most companies are dependent on a combination of Eskom power, UPS and generators to keep running," he points out. "But as we have discovered, these are all fallible. Typically, when load shedding occurs, the UPS kicks in for a short period, then the business falls back on a generator. Not only is diesel for running generators becoming increasingly costly, but generators themselves can fail. Few companies have several of them in place in case of emergency. MTN has invested heavily in multiple power sources and redundancy measures to minimise the risk of downtime at its data centres.
"Should all power be lost, data corruption can occur and business continuity is impacted. And recovery from disaster can be problematic, unless mission-critical systems and applications are hosted in the cloud," he says.
As part of MTN Business's strategy of becoming a full service ICT player, its cloud solutions enable cost-effective business continuity and disaster recovery that overcomes the power problem. "MTN's tier three and tier four data centres are geared to ensure near 100% power availability, with state-of-the-art security and monitoring," Kobedi notes. "Our hosting environment is highly secure. In an environment where any number of events could disrupt mission-critical systems and applications, there is a compelling case to be made for moving to cloud," he says.
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