Cloud-based and hosted services are showing excellent growth in SA, with small businesses and start-ups leading the way.
So says Kevin Derman, cloud and hosting business unit manager at First Distribution, adding: "IDC has predicted the value of cloud services in South Africa will reach $230 million by the end of 2014, and based on our experience, we're well on track to achieve that.
"Among small to medium businesses and start-ups, there's no longer even a question about whether they'll use cloud services; it's the first choice."
Derman says most of the demand is for software-as-a-service, with storage and infrastructure services following. "Collaboration and communication software is top of the list - businesses are opting for hosted exchange servers, hosted PABXes, online conferencing and Webinars. The second most in-demand service is security and backup - it's definitely one of the hot topics."
Warren Olivier, regional manager for southern Africa at Veeam Software, says SMEs do not have the capital to purchase the hardware upfront, and it is far less risky to hire for a limited time than to purchase. "Of course, in the long run, it would have been cheaper to buy outright, but they also did not have the risk burden."
He believes cloud computing is becoming an important part of a good data protection strategy. "The 3-2-1 rule says you should keep three copies of your data, on two different media, and one of them must be kept in a different location to avoid data loss," says Olivier.
"Sending a backup offsite can mean sending a box of tapes to a warehouse, but nowadays it's often more useful to send a file to the cloud. This moves the focus from mere backup to data availability - a backup is worthless if you can't restore from it, and cloud backups are instantly available, wherever you are."
Nonetheless, Olivier says SMEs are not aware of the regulatory compliance dangers of data loss, as perhaps they feel this does not extend to them, when in fact it does. "Also, perhaps they do not realise what an impact it would have on their business even if they did not lose the data, but it took a week to recover."
Derman cautions against choosing backup-as-a-service providers based only on price: "There are a plethora of service providers in the market at the moment - probably too many - and some of them are not going to last long.
"If the company providing your data protection goes under, what happens to your backups? That's why we're extremely careful about who we accept into our cloud services catalogue - they must have a track record showing the product and company are reliable."
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