Cape Town, 30 Sep 2013
One of the key benefits of cloud computing is that it allows an organisation to mitigate risks such as theft, fire and flood, which can result in downtime as well as data loss, effectively crippling an organisation. However, many decision-makers tend to shrug off the risk of such disaster until it is too late.
In the case of MUA, the decision to move to the cloud came just in time, as a burst water tank recently flooded its local server room, leaving it 'inches deep' under water. Fortunately, this came just months after MUA had migrated the majority of its IT environment into a tailor-made hybrid cloud, designed and hosted by CyberLogic, which also manages the rest of the MUA network environment. All that remained outside of this hosted environment was a local server at MUA's head office that handled some non-critical and internal data access.
"Much of our business is associated with risk management and it made sense to us to apply this thinking to our IT set-up as well," commented Christelle Fourie, Managing Director of MUA. "In this regard and in conjunction with CyberLogic who had proposed to us of the benefits of such a move, some 12 months ago, we started the process of changing to a managed outsourced situation, and specifically the move to a hosted cloud environment."
"We were convinced that this move would reduce our risk as well as eliminate a non-core function, ie, our dedicated IT unit," explained Fourie, "although, at the time, we didn't foresee a disaster occurring so soon after taking this decision and completing the transition. Fortunately, we narrowly avoided a massive calamity as the flood didn't impact our users or their experience of working with us; being hosted was a 'real winner'. If this had happened to us just a few months earlier, our business would have been severely crippled.
"There is no doubt that this experience confirmed that we were correct in making a move to the cloud environment that also offers us a fully redundant scenario as well as a business continuity set-up," continued Fourie. "At all times the CyberLogic guys have supported us well and immediately came on-site at the time of the disaster."
"The tailor-made hybrid cloud environment we created for MUA is hosted in a highly secure, world-class data centre, well protected from such disasters as fire and flood, with direct, high-speed access to the Internet. Aside from reducing risk, it also enables MUA to give their clients and partners secure access to their systems via the Internet, while MUA staff are able to access those systems via their own internal network," said Edge Bisset, CEO of CyberLogic. "This bespoke cloud solution maximises the benefits of cloud computing for the organisation.
"In addition, it provides a platform for innovation, as MUA has demonstrated by developing their own mobile insurance app, a first for the South African executive short-term insurance market," concluded Bisset. "The MUA mobile app, which hooks in to their cloud systems, has allowed them to differentiate themselves in a highly competitive market. As a result, MUA has gained a strategic advantage. It's a great example of how a company can innovate through the effective use of cloud computing, while reducing risk at the same time."
For further information, please contact Edge Bisset, tel: 021 425 4200; e-mail edgeb@cyberlogic.co.za.
Share