Organisations move from tactical to strategic on hybrid IT deployments

Ahmed Mahomed, CEO at Datacentrix

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Following a rush to deploy tactical solutions to enable business continuity early in 2020, South African organisations are now taking a more strategic approach to long-term planning of a new model for hybrid IT infrastructure.

This is according to Ahmed Mahomed, Group CEO of ICT solutions provider Datacentrix. “It has become clear that the pandemic won’t be over soon, and that hybrid and remote workforces will remain in place. This has meant that most organisations are looking closely at strategic digital transformation from the desktop to the cloud. They are focusing on long-term solutions to key issues, such as connectivity, security and how to manage applications and workloads, more efficiently and cost-effectively.”

Mahomed says the cloud plays a critical role in this hybrid IT environment, but that, at the same time, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the cloud, and that not all workloads and applications are suited to a public cloud. 

He says careful consideration must be given to the desired outcomes and the business case for moving workloads and applications to particular environments. “The platform an organisation chooses must be fit for purpose. An e-commerce business for example, needs the right connectivity for global access, and must have the capacity to burst out when necessary.

Stone He, President Huawei Cloud, Southern Africa.

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“Many organisations that adopted cloud early on are finding some workloads are proving costly to run in the cloud. The result is that many of our client engagements are now focused on assessing the environment in its entirety and then planning which applications are more suited for running in which cloud, and which must be modernised to integrate with a new hybrid IT environment. For enterprises such as large banks with home-grown bespoke software running core systems, this modernisation process could take years to complete. Depending on the client’s requirements, we might put cloud-type infrastructure on-premises in some cases, and migrate some infrastructure to the Datacentrix Teraco co-location data centre or hyperscalers and others.

“Because the technology is fairly mature, it is getting easier and faster to migrate to cloud environments,” he says. “However, unless there is a thorough analysis and planning before migration, organisations could experience complexities.”

Where major enterprises such as banks and telcos may have been among the first to move to the cloud, Datacentrix is now assisting mid-to-large businesses and smaller entities across all sectors to modernise their environments and migrate to the cloud. One such example is AFGRI, an agricultural services company. Datacentrix helped the organisation move from a lower performance siloed environment and hosted PaaS cloud environment to the Huawei Cloud, enhanced with security meeting international standards and a full IaaS and PaaS service. Huawei and Datacentrix also provided easy to use migration tools and VIP support to enable AFGRI to make the move quickly and easily.

“In every organisation’s cloud journey, the solution needs to be tailor made, so having an in-depth understanding not only of the environment, but the client’s business needs and strategies, is a fundamental part of the process,” says Mahomed.

Stone He, President Huawei Cloud (Southern Africa) also added: “Partnering with Datacentrix helps us to empower businesses in South Africa through a joint value creation model. We believe the potential benefits of technology depend largely on who you choose to partner with, who can support you in the long term without disruptions and with minimal risks,” he concluded.