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Price wars
With the local data centres up and running,
there is hope that pricing will come down,
making solutions even more affordable to
those organisations that are price-sensitive.
Of course, irrespective of whether data
is hosted or stored in the cloud, there will
always be a certain amount of risk involved.
While Microsoft has the best resources
available to ensure its environment is secure,
local companies must still work with trusted
business partners who can offer them an
additional security layer for their data. This
is especially important considering Microsoft
(and most other cloud providers) will only
protect organisational data to a point.
When it comes to moving data from the
local office (or devices) into the cloud, the
company still has a responsibility to ensure it
takes all possible precautions to keep it secure.
The country is already on the verge of a
cloud boom with many business partners
emerging whose sole focus is delivering
solutions for an online environment.
Moreover, the ones that provide the likes of
infrastructure-as-a-service and migration to
the cloud in addition to cost optimisation,
cloud frameworks, and other facets, will be
the ones most successful.
New approaches
Companies have begun running more
critical workloads in parallel with their on-
premise systems. Once a level of comfort
has been reached that the cloud provides
a reliable enough platform to deliver the
expected results, this will turn into an
online-only focus.
For the past several years, Microsoft has
embraced open source in the cloud using
partners to help it modernise the DevOps
COMPANIES HAVE BEGUN RUNNING MORE
CRITICAL WORKLOADS IN PARALLEL
WITH THEIR ON-PREMISE SYSTEMS.
FEATURE: CLOUD SOLUTIONS
processes driven by the containerisation
of infrastructure and applications. These
also scale quickly given the availability of a
significant number of orchestration tools.
This will result in the availability of best-fit
solutions that carry with them no fear of
vendor lock-in and interoperability of
their environments.
Hybrid world
When it comes to a hybrid cloud approach,
company strategies must start including
the ability for multi-cloud management
tools, easy billing, multi-tenancy and self-
service capabilities. Although many are
already using self-service capabilities, some
businesses are opting to use experts in
these areas to prevent cloud wastage and
unnecessary spend.
As with most other technology approaches,
cost optimisation is the key. To this end,
consumption-based models are more
efficient than capital expenditure especially
when it comes to on-premise hardware.
Many local customers have been waiting
for announcements from service providers
regarding the launch of local data centres
before embarking on their cloud journey
and strategy. Now is the time to embrace
this change. n
Dana Cinman, Product Specialist at
Obsidian Systems
www.intelligentcio.com
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