Cloud on Demand, in partnership with ITWeb, has unveiled the Cloud Computing Survey, which aims to determine the current mindset of South African organisations regarding their readiness to make the move to the cloud, and their expectations thereof.
"The results of this survey will give us, as a cloud computing service provider, valuable insight into where the local market is in terms of cloud adoption," says Jonathan Kropf, CEO and co-founder of Cloud on Demand. "Also important is a view on what is being adopted in the cloud by organisations, and what the potential inhibitors might be."
Kropf believes there is insufficient relevant local data available regarding South African organisations' adoption of cloud.
He also feels it is important for organisations not to get caught up in the cloud hype.
"Carefully selecting the business processes and applications that make business sense to move to a public cloud is vital, as it is not the case that everything relating to IT should be moved to the cloud," Kropf advises.
He adds: "Embracing quick wins that free up IT staff and onsite resources are the applications that need to be moved to the cloud first. A good example of this is e-mail. It is business critical, and whether it is on premises or not, an organisation still gets its e-mail delivered. That is a key application for an organisation to investigate - why infrastructure is being bought and maintained, and why there are expensive resources managing it."
According to Kropf, South African organisations should not look at what the US and Europe are doing when it comes to cloud adoption. "We tend to follow their trends from an IT perspective, but in South Africa, we have some significant challenges around the cost, performance and availability of bandwidth. This has a fundamental impact on what we choose to deploy in the cloud versus what they would view a no-brainer internationally," Kropf says.
When asked if he believes South African organisations are lagging behind the rest of the world in adopting cloud computing trends, Kropf says: "To a certain extent, due to South Africa's bandwidth issues. However, we have proven to be very innovative as a nation (look at how advanced we were with online banking adoption), which means we are willing to embrace new ideas and potentially may use the cloud differently to how the rest of the world does."
Kropf says there has been a massive uptake of e-mail hosted in the cloud in SA, and believes this is because e-mail is an easy win.
"Cloud is not a technology. It is about changing a mindset that says 'I need to see my server room and where my applications run'. Organisations can compare this to the fact that they are not as concerned about where the power stations are when a light switch is flipped on; the same notion can be applied to having a server room on site for their IT requirements."
Click here to take part in the survey, which runs from 26 August to 9 September, and stand a chance to win a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2.
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