Barry Kemp, Head of IaaS at Vox, believes South African businesses need to move to the cloud rather than storing data on-premise.
We believe that it is better to move to the cloud than being on-premise. Any business in South Africa that is not looking at moving to the cloud is making a big mistake for a number of reasons.
Today, we have to worry about consistent power supply, especially with the current load shedding that South Africa faces. If you stay on-premise, you will need generators, which you will need to maintain, and need staff to look after the equipment in the data centre and maintain connectivity to the office.
When moving your apps to the cloud, this – in simple terms – becomes the service provider’s problem. You, as a business, will not need to worry about the impact of load shedding on your equipment and ultimately your data.
One of the most common reasons we hear as to why businesses want to shift back to on-premise is security. Unfortunately, many businesses are still in the mindset that if they see the equipment, they have control.
If you look at Microsoft and AWS – they spend millions of rands on security infrastructure. Microsoft alone has over 3,500 people only focused on security and they spend around R3 billion on security. No business has the budget to spend such amounts on security, and this should give any organisation peace of mind.
Another factor that comes to the fore is that business, when having their own servers and data centres, have their own IT staff. The worry is that these individuals will lose their jobs if the company moves to the cloud. However, there is still a place for them as they can now focus on high-value tasks such as automation and AI. These roles didn’t exist in the past and give these individuals new opportunities to get involved in enhancing the business.
Further to the above factors, businesses often need to lower their budgets and therefore look at staying or moving back on-premise for the cost savings. But there are ways for businesses to take advantage of the cloud without blowing the budget. Planning your migration and scoping the migration correctly is essential. Once in the cloud, businesses can easily keep control of the costs by effectively using and managing the cloud environment.
