EDITOR’S QUESTION
RICK VANOVER, DIRECTOR
OF TECHNICAL PRODUCT
MARKETING AND EVANGELISM,
VEEAM SOFTWARE
D
igital transformation is now
requisite for survival for all
enterprises in Africa, across all
industries. The exponential growth
that we are going to see in data from
connected devices and increased
mobility will contribute to greater
strain on legacy IT systems. But this
transformation is not straightforward,
and requires healthy investment, with
a clear strategy on data availability to
underpin it.
Many businesses and processes simply
cannot operate in a ‘manual mode’
today, this is the central theme of
any headline outage – a clear digital
dependency. The modern enterprise
needs to be anchored with key
technologies provided by virtualisation,
modern storage systems and cloud
technologies in order to be fully
transformative. Having 24.7.365 access
“Having 24.7.365
access to data,
services and
applications
must be the
narrative thread
that continually
drives the digital
transformation
story.”
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INTELLIGENTCIO
to data, services and applications must
be the narrative thread that continually
drives the digital transformation story.
This is where the sophisticated
deployment of cloud technologies fits
into transforming the enterprise from
legacy to future-proofed. It’s not simply
about adopting cloud as a whole, but
investing in the right areas. Not enough
enterprises are yet leveraging the lower
cost and flexibility benefits of the public
cloud, and there’s still an assumption
that data must be kept on-premise due
to perceived security issues. Enterprises
must go beyond simple application
testing in the public cloud environment.
It’s about using hybrid cloud in a
way that benefits the individual
organisation, and its workloads. For
example, a university may choose to
move some of its workloads to the
public cloud – to benefit from its scale
and responsiveness – at particularly
busy times during the year, as it knows
it will be dealing with a vast influx of
data that an on-premise setup may
not handle. But examples like this – of
deploying a hybrid cloud model to
leverage the respective merits of public
and private infrastructures to transform
the business – is still too rare.
The biggest challenge to adopting new
technologies on the road to digital
transformation can be a combination
of people, processes and problems.
The people (whether it be users or IT
staff) can have objections to change or
possibly do not have the bandwidth to
take on another technology. Processes
suffer a similar challenge in that there
may be compatibility issues; especially
“The modern
enterprise needs to
be anchored with
key technologies
provided by
virtualisation,
modern storage
systems and cloud
technologies in
order to be fully
transformative.”
with legacy applications. These create
problems when it comes to adopting
a new technology; as the migration
processes can be difficult and many
organisations need a compelling value
to make the effort worthwhile.
In my practice, I advocate that the effort
of change is worth it when you consider
key benefits – such as a better Availability
experience. This is a fundamental driver
for many changes. For example, an
organisation may need a robust disaster
recovery strategy; but in order to get
there some legacy applications need
to change. They can’t have the rich
disaster recovery experience without
key modernisations and this becomes
a business discussion: Can the legacy
technologies give the business the
Availability experience they need? n
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