Johannesburg, 18 Oct 2021
While there is strong growth in cloud adoption and interest, there are still organisations that are hesitant to migrate to the cloud. The good news is that AWS and IBM can make cloud migration faster and more cost effective than organisations expect.
This is according to speakers at a webinar on Cloud migration made easy: The power of Blue Pearl with IBM Cloud Pak and AWS Workloads. They said many of the concerns companies once had around cloud migrations have now been addressed, including data sovereignty, complexity and runaway costs.
Saireshan Govender, founder and CEO of Blue Pearl, said: “We have experienced for ourselves how easy and cost effective it is to migrate to the cloud with IBM Cloud Paks and AWS. We found there was minimal impact on the operational environment, with cost control easily achieved.”
Founded in 2013, Blue Pearl focuses on data analytics, Business Intelligence, software development, AI and cloud, and is a partner of First Distribution, an IBM and AWS distributor. Govender outlined how Blue Pearl had leveraged AWS and IBM tools to launch its blueapp to market.
Blue Pearl’s blueapp is a platform designed to connect technical developers to clients; giving quick access to accredited and specialised skills in a single platform.
Govender said: “AWS Quick Start and IBM Cloud Paks were used to spin up the architecture quickly and IBM Watson to power the matching engine. We had the backend architecture up and running in about two days. We launched in July 2020, and within the first three weeks we had about 70 consultants signed on and around eight clients, and we had to scale up instantly and yet control costs, which AWS enabled. We now have 229 online consultants and 20 large clients with over 23,000 consultant hours sold to date. Without IBM and AWS, we would never have got the application up and running this quickly and effectively.”
Khomotso Khalo, AWS sales specialist at First Distribution highlighted AWS Quick Starts, fast low-cost automated reference deployments built by Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions architects and AWS Partners. “Quick Starts eliminate hundreds of manual configuration steps, and are designed with security and availability in mind. Quick Starts enable you to deploy solutions and workloads to AWS quickly and easily – often in less than an hour,” she said.
IBM Cloud Paks for Data
Bhavesh Bhana, information architect and technical specialist at IBM DataOps, noted that IBM Cloud Paks for Data and the IBM Data Fabric enable businesses to transform themselves into data-driven organisations amid their moves to migrate to cloud and modernise their infrastructure.
He said: “Many organisations are like sailors on a stranded ship, where water – or data – is everywhere but there’s not a drop to drink. Understanding and making use of all the data available is a huge challenge for many organisations. Much data is lost or forgotten about, and harnessing all this available data needs a top-down data driven approach.”
A data driven approach should invite everyone to participate and it should be democratised for the many, he said. “You have to make data a team sport, but to enable data-driven decision making for everyone, there needs to be a platform that welcomes everyone in,” Bhana said.
“The citizen analyst brings the wisdom of the crowd to data analytics. To enable these citizens to contribute, a low-code or no-code platform should be available so citizens can build models and collaborate with others. To connect everything you need a data fabric, which removes complexity and is a prerequisite to inviting all employees to participate, in a governed and automated way, with privacy rules automatically applied. The IBM data fabric platform and Cloud Paks support data driven organisations,” he said.