What strategies should organisations have in place when adopting the public cloud?
By Matthew Lee, Regional Manager for Africa at SUSE
African attitudes towards the cloud over the years have changed drastically with companies moving at least some of their processes to a hosted environment, the migration is bringing with it a realisation of business opportunities that are too appealing to ignore.
Cloud technology is helping businesses develop new, innovative and agile solutions to meet the challenges of the on-demand, interconnected world. It provides convenient, on-demand access to shared pools of computing resources. Offering businesses new ways of developing, deploying and operating their IT solutions, helping improve efficiency, reduce costs or rebalance Capex and Opex expenditure. Adopting the right cloud strategy can deliver the flexibility and scalability to respond quickly to new demands and drive growth, while also providing a convenient path to IT modernisation.
For organisations looking at strategies that help accelerate innovation and drive digital transformation on a larger or global scale, cloud is the solution as it can:
- Accelerate innovation and time to market by combining enterprise open source solutions with the industry-leading, hyper-scale public cloud platforms and services
- Enhance business agility and competitiveness at the new velocity of digital business without compromising on the level of reliability, availability and security your organisation’s workload demands
- Provide easy access to secure and scalable enterprise open source solutions that are optimised for on-demand deployment of preconfigured images
- Optimise how you deliver IT with the transformative economics of a pay-as-you-go, utility-consumption model
In fact, the cloud has evolved significantly in recent years. Innovations are taking place on a continuous basis resulting in companies realising the cost and efficiency benefits are too good to pass up on. While the cloud once required a complicated change in business process it is now easily deployable and highly available for business-critical applications and systems.
With the cloud providing companies with the desired agility to meet the needs of business, staff across departments can work closer together to capture market opportunities. The silo approach is no longer good enough. Departments such as IT, business, marketing and operations now need to integrate how they take on new business and the cloud provides an ideal platform to do so.
In addition, with so many cloud service providers leveraging enterprise open source solutions giving organisations the flexibility and customisation options they need, it really is a case of business being spoilt for choice. However, companies still need to do their due diligence to ensure they partner with a trusted service provider who embraces open standards and takes the time to understand their business requirements and not just push a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution their way.
The cloud is also a great way for business to scale its infrastructure and IT staff more efficiently. This means that IT resources can be tracked and monitored in such a way that utilisation is never wasted. By freeing up technical teams to no longer provision and manage every workload that goes through to the server, they can focus on leveraging them for other business opportunities. This also means that IT teams do not necessarily have to grow ad infinitum with fewer people being able to streamline their responsibilities.
Cloud computing in Africa is at the cusp of pushing through traditional perceptions. Next year could very well be the one that companies, irrespective of size and industry, continue their adoption rates and utilise the cloud to capture new opportunities. Given tightening budgets and increased competition, they can ill afford not to.
