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NEC XON increases F5 specialisation to help businesses move to multi-cloud environments


Johannesburg, 29 Apr 2019
Mark Harris, chief marketing officer at NEC XON.
Mark Harris, chief marketing officer at NEC XON.

NEC XON is one of the only African organisations capable of maximising customer benefits from F5 Networks solutions since it recently gained rare certifications, which have improved opportunities for African organisations to adopt secure and optimised multi-cloud architectures.

F5 Networks solutions provide security services for public, private and hybrid cloud, as well as traditional on-premises architectures, traffic management, automation and orchestration, provided via several architectures.

NEC XON, a Gold Sponsor at the F5 Networks Forum, at the Maslow, on 30 April, will demonstrate several use cases at the event. These will include migrating from HA Proxy to F5 LTM in the banking sector, upgrading legacy F5 applications, ASM and GSM, as well as migrating from LVM to F5 LTM in the financial services sector, migrating DevOps to the public cloud in the media sector, and implementing LTM in the banking sector during the break-away session.

The company's enhanced capabilities bolster several years of experience in migrating customers to the cloud on its own public cloud platform, Wingu.

"Multi-cloud gives organisations opportunities to avoid being locked in by vendors and any one cloud service provider. It helps reduce costs, improves performance, and there are numerous security benefits, such as distributed denial of service (DDOS) mitigation, better reliability, disaster recovery (DR) advantages, and more," says Mark Harris, chief marketing officer at NEC XON. "The recent availability of Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's AWS clouds, among others, signal that this trend is in high demand in South Africa and across the continent."

He says a majority of South African businesses initially seek to migrate elements of their IT infrastructure and operations to the cloud. A popular choice is disaster recovery (DR).

"Ensuring that your architecture capitalises on the unique benefits F5 offers in securing these cloud environments, particularly in multi-cloud and hybrid environments, can make an enormous difference to the returns, efficiencies and benefits businesses derive," says Harris. "Enterprises face the same security and compliance issues in the cloud as in traditional data centres. Public cloud typically guarantees the security of the infrastructure, but application owners take responsibility for securing their applications and data.

"Consistent security for applications among multiple cloud environments, or in hybrid environments, is still a challenge for nearly half of all organisations," he says. "F5 surveyed nearly 2 000 organisations worldwide in 2018 and 87% of them already have application-first multi-cloud architectures. Businesses in South Africa and Africa are quickly catching up with that scenario, so these types of challenges are set to become more pronounced."

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NEC XON

NEC XON is the combination of XON, a systems integrator providing custom ICT and security services and solutions in southern Africa since 1996, and NEC Africa, the African business of the global technology giant NEC Corporation. NEC Corporation implemented its first communication solution in Africa in 1963 and established NEC Africa in 2011 to grow its business ICT and public safety.

Kapela Capital, XON's B-BBEE partner since 2012, continues as NEC XON's B-BBEE partner in South Africa, with Israel Skosana as chairman of the board of directors of NEC XON.

NEC generates global revenues in excess of $30 billion by orchestrating a brighter world for public entities, enterprises, telecoms carriers and providing system platforms for businesses.

The combined NEC Africa and XON (NEC XON) operations seek to more fully explore the opportunities for safe city, energy, cyber security, telecommunication solutions, retail, managed services, cyber defence services and cloud (both public and private), among others in sub-Sahara Africa.

NEC XON maintains its head offices in Gauteng, South Africa with a footprint that covers all nine provinces in South Africa and 16 countries in sub-Sahara Africa.

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