Delivering cloud value to businesses of all sizes

Gareth Smith, Senior Manager – Data Centre Infrastructure and Cloud Computing at Sizwe Africa IT Group.

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For decades, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operated in one sphere of business, and large corporates operated in another, and it was a case of never the twain shall meet. However, the advent of the cloud has changed all that.

Today, businesses of all sizes are able to access enterprise quality solutions, thanks to the cloud. Such access, especially for organisations that are not yet at enterprise level, allows them to expand their operational footprint into those global markets that traditionally belonged to the enterprise space.

Gareth Smith, Senior Manager – Data Centre Infrastructure and Cloud Computing at Sizwe Africa IT Group, explains that in a tough economy, with rising inflation and additional challenges like load-shedding, businesses of all sizes can gain a significant financial benefit by adopting the cloud.

“Don’t forget that in such tight economic circumstances, there are many businesses – both large and small – that struggle to afford the high overheads that come with the underlying hardware and expertise needed to run a cloud solution. Services such as web hosting, e-mail hosting, backup services. And they are also often beyond their reach. It is for these reasons and more that a hosted cloud solution is the ideal option for them,” he says.

“After all, these players seldom have either the trained personnel or the security expertise required to safely operate their business in the cloud. With a hosted solution, they gain access to 24/7/365 support, and the service provider’s own comprehensive security – which in Sizwe Africa IT Group's case, includes firewalls, intrusion detection and spam protection.”

Ultimately, he explains, it is the sheer scalability of the cloud, coupled with its pay-as-you-use principle, that delivers the benefits to these organisations. The ability to grow your business organically is made easy by the cloud’s ability to scale to meet an organisation’s changing business requirements.

Smith notes that it is equally important for any organisation that chooses to move to the cloud to ensure that their hosted cloud provider of choice offers a data centre that is technology-agnostic, secure and flexible. He adds that businesses that choose Sizwe Africa IT Group’s Tier 2 Managed Data Centre get the very best in technical infrastructure and security operations.

"At Sizwe Africa IT Group, we firmly believe in the potential of cloud computing for the future of IT, and our goal is to make this technology accessible to businesses of all sizes across South Africa.”

“To this end, we offer services to the market that are designed not only to deliver outstanding value for money, but more crucially, to also provide an affordable, secure, dependable and, above all, scalable cloud hosting solution. These cutting-edge cloud services are readily accessible at sizwe.cloud," he concludes.