INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud
Local cloud services:
Read the fine print
Cloud solutions can bring significant advantages to your business, but it’s important to select your partner carefully
W
hen your data is stored
locally, within the data centre
of a reputable cloud services
partner, you might think that it’s as
safe as it could be. Not necessarily, says
Riaan Terblanche, Solutions Architect at
First Technology Digital, a specialist IT
consulting company. Terblanche refers
to a real-life example, where an African
independent insurance broker, which
learned its lesson the hard way, lost
all of its data residing with a local ISP
due to a technical malfunction, only
to then learn that there had also been
no recent snapshots or backups of this
data by its partner.
“It’s a bitter pill to swallow, whatever
the size of your company, and a very
real risk for local businesses moving
onto the cloud; one that could
potentially threaten the very existence
of your organisation moving forward,”
Terblanche explains.
So, what are the alternatives?
Companies opting for an on-premise
solution over cloud are looking at
investing a good R10 million on
infrastructure, Terblanche adds, and
www.intelligentcio.com
that’s just for hardware. “You can easily
add another three to four million to
this amount, and that’s without even
splashing out on a backup solution and
storage area network (SAN). Not only
this, but within two to three years, this
technology will need to be refreshed;
there’s just no end to the costs.
“Cloud services hold a definite cost
advantage over on-premise solutions,
but it’s important to select your
partner carefully.”
In the example given above, First
Technology Digital was able to assist
this local company to successfully
migrate to the cloud, using Microsoft
Azure, a growing collection of integrated
cloud services that developers and
IT professionals use to build, deploy,
and manage applications through
Microsoft’s global network of data
centres. “By migrating to a trusted
Azure environment, we were able to
ensure that the organisation’s data is
backed up automatically as an ongoing
concern. The successful migration has
also provided the company with strong
cybersecurity controls and multi-level
protection as well as a service level
agreement of 99.95% availability –
which equates to a mere 4.38 hours of
downtime per year.
“Azure offers flexible pricing on a
pay-as-you-use basis, allowing for
improved budget management. It’s
easy to check exact costs upfront too
by using the online pricing calculator,
which can track actual account usage
and bill at any time. There’s also a total
cost of ownership (TCO) calculator
available that compares the TCO of an
on-premise solution with a comparable
Azure deployment. There are no
hardware costs involved, and software
updates all take place automatically at
no additional charge.”
And companies hesitant to make use
of international cloud services providers
will be reassured to learn that Microsoft
will be delivering cloud services from
Azure data centres in Johannesburg and
Cape Town from 2018, a move that not
only shows Microsoft’s commitment to
Africa, but is also significant in helping
businesses across Africa to accelerate
their cloud journey, Terblanche states. n
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