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Hybrid cloud to continue dominating SA landscape

StorEx is well positioned to serve all infrastructure uptime requirements regardless of asset location.

Johannesburg, 07 Jul 2020

While globally, 80% of organisations are predicted to migrate towards cloud, hosting and co-location services by 2025, Sean Hackett, managing director, The Tech Company, a local cloud services solution provider and partner to StorEx, says local adoption rates are slower and will be dominated by hybrid cloud spend for the next three to five years.

“While there is a growing number of cloud vendors targeting South Africa, the cost predominately leans on opex spend within an enterprise, which slows the adoption rate when compared to international standards. Also affecting growth are the myriad economic challenges, including ROE fluctuations and connectivity backhaul stability,” says Hackett.

Sean Hackett, managing director, The Tech Company, a local cloud services solution provider and partner to StorEx.
Sean Hackett, managing director, The Tech Company, a local cloud services solution provider and partner to StorEx.

While there is an increase in the African market, South Africa in particular, it’s a strong hybrid cloud trend: “Smaller compute workloads are cautiously testing the public and private cloud offerings available as the challenging economic times continue to dictate IT opex spend. When it comes to large infrastructure sets that have been rooted into a network financially and technically, often the cut-over to public cloud is a longer process, with financial outlooks that are different to the current status quo.” This is thus having a negative impact and is delaying any major increase in the adoption of serverless environments. There is also a significant lack of critical cloud computing skills to ensure adoption and implementations are successful,” says Hackett.

Over the next 36 months, Hackett says the market will start to see a broader increase in hybrid cloud adoptions; while public cloud offerings and compute power costs will decrease, the overall progress integrated carefully to mitigate risk. Instead, enterprises will start gearing balance sheets and technical resources to tackle cloud operations more effectively.

Challenges will remain, and Hackett says that often, these include a battle of wills within the C-suite: “The engagement between CFOs and CTOs is often a battle of wills. While one will look to reduce cost, his counterpart will look for stability, scalability, efficiency and uptime.

Companies invest millions of rands in acquiring IT infrastructure over time, and sometimes are deceived by end-of-life/end-of-service-life dates, when faced with the decision to either upgrade, refresh or migrate. Third-party maintenance services like StorEx enables companies to get the most out of their previous ICT investments, giving you an additional option when faced with this decision.

Jan Beukes, CEO, StorEx, says the company is not blind to the innovation that takes place in the technology landscape, but rather gives senior IT decision-makers an alternative option when planning their cloud/hybrid strategies: "The company allows you to ease some of the challenges that a migration journey may pose, by giving a much-needed cost saving on the maintenance of your existing enterprise equipment and allowing for complete system uptime in the customers' IT environment. This will bring ease to both the CFO and CTO. It is important to keep a balance between a company’s business needs and budget.”

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StorEx

StorEx is a leading supplier of Third-Party Maintenance services, founded in 2008. The company specializes in the Support, Maintenance and Life-Cycle extension of medium size and enterprise level IT Hardware and Software Infrastructure. Their cost-effective Service Level Agreement offerings provide low risk, high quality solutions across Multiple OEM Brands via a Single Point of Contact, within Africa, the Middle East, APAC, Americas and Europe.

For more information visit www.storexsa.co.za

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