COMMENT
COMMENT
Africa is ripe with
opportunity and innovation Coming to grips
with enterprise cloud
T A
en years ago, hardly anyone
owned a smartphone. Today,
there are around 2 billion in
circulation. What is more, we use them
every day to access Uber, WhatsApp,
Instagram and many other services
that did not exist when the first iPhone
was released in 2007.
Yet we are only at the start of a
digital technology revolution that
will profoundly change how we live
and work in the next five years.
With artificial intelligence, fintech –
especially blockchain – and the Internet
of things coming of age, we can expect
digital disruption to accelerate in the
years to come.
The previous wave of digital disruption,
triggered by mobile technology, caught
most CIOs and organisations off
guard. Many industry incumbents lost
market share to new-age technology
companies or experienced declines in
brand value and customer satisfaction
because they could not keep pace with
the demands of a changing customer
and employee.
This time, CIOs should ensure that
they are better prepared. The difficulty
is that we do not really know where
the technology will take us. We have
a vague sense of the direction, but no
clear view of the destination.
Against this backdrop of unrelenting
change, the only way to survive is
to embrace a culture of innovation.
Rather than encouraging teams to stick
to the rules, organisations should be
ready to experiment, to fail fast, and
be able to recover quickly from failure.
As futurist Graeme Codrington put it
in a recent Sage podcast: the single
most important thing you can do to be
responsive to change is to experiment.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
t present, conversations within
IT organisations are centred on
the topic of ‘enterprise cloud’.
In the simplest terms, enterprise cloud is
cloud infrastructure designed to deliver
the same agility as the public cloud, but
within the enterprise data centre.
Keith Fenner, Vice President, Sage Enterprise, Middle East and Africa
Leaders need to create a mindset
and a structure that makes constant
experimentation possible.
CIOs are now expected to guide the
entire business through new ways of
working. An IDC Survey reveals that
more than 40% of line-of-business
executives view the CIO as the Chief
Innovation Officer.
As the people with their fingers on
technology’s pulse, they should
embrace their role of championing
innovation and agility in the business.
It is not as easy as it seems. Aside from
the actual technology, they need to
start creating an open, collaborative
culture where digital natives can grow
well. For constant change to work,
it also means using today’s open
business management solutions and
the power of the cloud to quickly
and cost-effectively build out new
applications and services.
And of course, continual upskilling of
the entire team will be needed to keep
up – this should happen on a daily
basis and should be part of the culture,
waiting for annual training seminars
simply will not cut it anymore.
We are lucky to live in a time where
huge technical infrastructures and
a massive IT team are no longer
necessary to access world-class
technology. Deployment is also fast,
provided companies are running
an open platform that allows them
to easily plug in other services and
applications via an API.
Do you want to digitise your factory
floor processes and machines to
increase automation? Well, today,
Internet of things sensors are cheap
and open and it is easy to provision a
software solution from the cloud using
nothing more than a credit card. If it
does not work out, it is not the end of
the world because you have made no
heavy infrastructure investments.
Testing new technologies is easier,
faster and less risky than ever
before. In fact, the risk today is not
experimenting, not trying new things
and not failing fast. Companies that
are not keeping up with the pace of
change could find themselves left
behind by a changing world – just
think about what happened to Kodak
after digital cameras and DVD stores
after Netflix.
www.intelligentcio.com
At the top of the enterprise cloud model
(the first layer) are familiar cloud pillars
as defined by the National Institute of
Standards (NIST): self-service, broad
network access, elasticity, resource
pooling, and so on. “Enterprise cloud
must provide all of these,” says Kieran
Harty, Chief Technology Officer and co-
founder of Tintri.
The second layer of the model is where
enterprise cloud begins to differentiate
itself. An enterprise cloud must be able
to run both traditional enterprise- and
cloud-native applications efficiently.
“Enterprise applications are mostly
pre-existing applications written in a
style that makes assumptions about
the underlying infrastructure on which
they run,” explains Harty. “For instance,
enterprise applications often run in a
virtual environment such as VMware or
Hyper-V. They also frequently expect
that data protection, disaster recovery
and other services will be provided
external to the application.”
designed to be highly
scalable and written in a
way that doesn’t assume
much about the underlying
infrastructure,” points
out Harty.
“To make this clear, an
enterprise cloud must
provide the infrastructure
and services needed by
traditional enterprise
applications, while also
delivering the ability to
run new cloud-native
applications. While it
is often possible to run
enterprise applications
in a public cloud, all the
underlying capabilities the
application needs may not
be present. In addition,
enterprise applications tend
to be less elastic, so they can
be expensive to run in
public cloud due to continuous
resource consumption.
Kieran Harty, Chief Technology Office and
co-founder at Tintri
“It’s probably becoming more evident
that enterprise cloud does not have a
singular definition,” he says.
Examples of enterprise applications
include both in-house-developed
applications as well as common
applications such as Exchange, SQL
Server, Oracle and so on. That is, every enterprise will employ
a variety of models according to
individual need – a combination of
private data centre, public cloud, and
outsourced service providers. And so,
being able to integrate between on-
premises data centres, service providers
and the public cloud, is a key element
of enterprise cloud.
Cloud-native applications are typically
built from scratch to run in a cloud
environment such as AWS or Azure.
Examples might include mobile
applications and customer-facing web
applications. “These applications are “Tintri satisfies enterprise cloud
requirements with storage
infrastructure for on-premises data
centres and service providers as well as
integration with public cloud services.
The Tintri enterprise cloud platform
www.intelligentcio.com
delivers public cloud agility inside
your four walls. And, because Tintri’s
enterprise cloud platform is designed
to operate directly on VMs, vDisks and
containers, it is able to do things that
other storage cannot,” highlights Harty.
Anton Jacobsz, Managing Director at
Networks Unlimited, a Value Added
Distributor of Tintri in Africa, adds:
“Organisations in Africa are grappling
with the term enterprise cloud, the
exponential growth of data and
the challenge of storing this data.
Networks Unlimited is pleased to offer
Tintri, a powerful product throughout
the region to address not only these
issues but also the TCO problems in
an organisation. A real bonus is that
it offers users the end of a tedious
journey, by automating mundane tasks
and increases performance for less in
an enterprise. It’s all about economies
of scale in the enterprise cloud.”
INTELLIGENTCIO
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