While globally, 80% of organisations are predicted to migrate toward cloud , hosting and colocation services by 2025, Sean Hackett, managing director, The Tech Company, a South African cloud services solution provider and partner to StorEx, says that local adoption rates are slower and will be dominated by hybrid cloud spend for the next three to five years.
“While there is a growing number of cloud vendors targeting South Africa, the cost predominately leans on OPEX spend within an enterprise, which slows the adoption rate when compared to international standards. Also affecting growth is the myriad of economic challenges including ROE fluctuations and connectivity backhaul stability,” says Hackett.
While there is an increase in the African market, South Africa in particular, it’s a strong hybrid cloud trend: “Smaller compute workloads are cautiously testing the public and private cloud offerings available as the challenging economic times continue to dictate IT OPEX spend. When it comes to large infrastructure sets that have been rooted into a network financially and technically often the cut over to public cloud is a longer process with financial outlooks that are different to the current status quo.” This is thus having a negative impact and is delaying any major increase in the adoption of serverless environments. There is also a significant lack of critical cloud computing skills to ensure adoption and implementations are successful” says Hackett.
Over the next 36 months, Hackett says the market will start to see a broader increase in hybrid cloud adoptions, while public cloud offerings and compute power costs will decrease, the overall progress integrated carefully to mitigate risk. Instead, enterprises will start gearing balance sheets and technical resources to tackle cloud operations more effectively.
Challenges will remain, and Hackett says that often these include a battle of wills within the c-suite: “The engagement between CFO’s and CTO’s is often a battle of wills. While one will look to reduce cost, his counterpart will look for stability, scalability, efficiency, and uptime.
Companies invest millions of Rands in acquiring IT infrastructure over time, and sometimes are deceived by end-of-life/ end-of-service-life dates, when faced with the decision to either upgrade, refresh, or migrate. Third Party Maintenance services like StorEx offers enables companies to get the most out of their previous ICT investments, giving you an additional option when faced with this decision.
Jan Beukes, CEO, StorEx, says that the company is not blind to the innovation that takes place in the technology landscape, but rather gives senior IT decision makers an alternative option when planning their cloud/ hybrid strategies :”The company allow you to ease some of the challenges that a migration journey may pose, by giving a much-needed cost saving on the maintenance of your existing enterprise equipment and allowing for complete system uptime in the customers IT environment. This will bring ease to both the CFO and CTO. It is important to keep a balance between a company’s business needs and budget.”
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