Cloud technology and services have gained widespread adoption and have made a huge impact on the way business runs. It seems South African customers have grabbed on to the value proposition of cloud with gusto.
On this note ITWeb, in partnership with Neotel, recently ran an online cloud survey to determine some of cloud's true benefits and gain clarity on how South African organisations are approaching its adoption.
The survey revealed that a combined percentage of 60% are using and implementing cloud. It's not surprising that only 9% of respondents cited they have no interest in cloud at this time.
"Indeed, South African IT consumers have realised that, with careful planning and an honest assessment of the capabilities of a cloud services, it can bring significant business benefits. The crux thereof is that prospective cloud consumers need to be selective in whom they entrust their business operations to," says Andre Schoeman, data centre specialist at Neotel, commenting on the results of the ITWeb/Neotel 2016 Cloud Survey.
Not all cloud implementations are equal in their implementation, he continues.
"So therefore it is important not to treat cloud as a one-flavour commodity but rather to search for the features of the cloud service that match those of the company's requirements - specifically in terms of platform resiliency, security measures, and ease of porting in and out."
Just under half of the respondents (42%) indicated they have chosen hybrid cloud (a combination of public, private or community) for their organisation.
According to Schoeman cloud does not have to be an all-or-nothing affair.
"The astute cloud consumer filters the various applications under his control and selects those applications that port well to the cloud - especially where those applications are non-core and/or common across many industries. Therefore the mix of private cloud for certain workloads and public cloud for others makes great sense - even from a point of limiting risk," he says.
Elaborating on this, Schoeman says the IT team can break down the application stack and classify those applications that are standard, non-core, and/or share great similarity to other organisations.
"Those would be the low-hanging fruit, since migration based on standard templates are the easiest. Thereafter, an honest assessment of the age and lifespan of hardware under the IT department's control can give guidance to where IAAS [Infrastructure as a Service] cloud servers can be used in the short term."
Controlling cloud's impact
The survey shows that the top three chosen impact of cloud services on ICT are: ability to offer more services (64%); IT becoming more strategic (58%) and less time spent updating infrastructure (50%).
Schoeman believes that the ability for a company to grow and shrink their IT systems based on their requirements as and when they want unlocks fantastic business value.
"Not to mention the fact that hard capital can be invested in business operations and not be used for investments in IT hardware."
The percentages were pretty much evenly split when asked what key features are looked for in a cloud provider, with 78% choosing availability of services/data; 65% choosing confidentiality of corporate data and 64% choosing integrity of services/data.
According to Schoeman, the security discussion and cloud is synonymous.
"The prudent cloud consumer will ensure that all aspects of the cloud service he/she procures are secured - from the networking right through to data storage. Similarly, the willingness for the cloud provider to allow you to remove your data from the platform. Many cloud providers provide an easy glide-path to ingest data, but are rather skittish when it comes to relinquishing a company's data."
When asked how important it is for IT to allocate an adequate spend to cloud, the results show that a third of respondents allocate over 50% of their budget spend to cloud. A combined percentage of 45% allocate less than 50%.
"Cloud should not be seen as a separate IT budget line. The question to be asked should rather be where that budget line could be spent better - on in-house, dedicated IT systems, or on cloud services," Schoeman concludes.
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