Johannesburg, 12 Nov 2019
The growing number of cyber threats faced by businesses today, combined with an increasingly stringent regulatory environment that includes new data protection regulations, have put pressure on CIOs to ensure they have reliable infrastructure in place.
This has resulted in a growing number of organisations looking to the cloud, as it not only offers the security and compliance they need, but comes hand in hand with cost savings, scalability, business efficiencies and high availability.
“In fact, analysts at Gartner have predicted that global public cloud revenue will swell to $278 billion by the year 2021,” says Angela Mace, CRM and events director at ITWeb. “And as with most game-changing trends, the skyrocketing popularity of cloud is seeing traditional data centres starting to face a number of challenges.”
For the first time, she says, customer workloads are now hosted off-premises in large public or even hyper-scale clouds, instead of hosted within the business. “This means that some traditional data centres are finding it harder to find new business, and are looking for ways to transform themselves in line with the digital age.”
“Before the cloud was ubiquitous, most organisations built their own data centres, meaning that ongoing investment in the latest technologies was needed in order to remain operational and effective. They also struggled with capacity, as traditional data centres could not rapidly scale up or down in line with user and business demands.”
According to Mace, the cloud has proven itself to be a secure and reliable alternative to the ownership and operation of proprietary data centres. This is why more and more businesses are moving away from their own on-premises data centres to cloud-based public ones.
“However, although some industry pundits predicted the death of the data centre, this is far from the case,” she adds. “Data centres are here to stay; some might even argue that they are needed now more than ever.”
After all, Mace says, irrespective of whether business are using a data centre or a public cloud, at the end of the day, their data is still hosted in a data centre. “Data centres, instead of falling away, are evolving from their traditional state and are becoming increasingly scalable, flexible and cost-effective.
Mace says the ITWeb Cloud, Data Centre & DevOps Summit, to be held on 11 February at The Forum, in Bryanston, will unpack all the latest cloud and data centre trends to help businesses choose the perfect option for them.
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