Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 38 | Page 28

EDITOR’S QUESTION space to run my app on but when it goes wrong, I am on my own to fix it and because I don’t have access to the behind-the-scene layers of Azure troubleshooting, it is a lot more difficult for me. The costs of putting that app in the cloud to me does not make sense. I can buy hardware from Dell that has the best SLA and support and I have visibility into all of the layers which enhances my ability to resolve issues. That said, I don’t think moving everyone back to the clients’ on-premises is the answer due to our power situation. The data centres are geared to run on generators for days at a time if necessary; not all businesses can afford that which is one significant consideration for not bringing everything back to your own data centre. What I see happening is clients provisioning their own private cloud in data centres – they get the benefit of being in control of their own systems and having the uptime that these data centres offer. Customers will purchase their own hardware and co-locate this in a data centre. Our own environment is similar to the above. We use office 365 for all the messaging and collaboration tools; we let MS run that and get on with it. Our ERP system plus systems management tools that we want more control over are hosted on our own equipment within the Hetzner and Teraco data centres. When our generator recently failed, we were still able to work by sending people home and running over 3G, we got the benefits of cloud but not at the high cost if we run everything in Azure. www.intelligentcio.com