South African businesses are showing a growing tendency towards adopting cloud strategy, according to Andrew Cruise, managing director of Routed, a vendor neutral cloud hosting platform provider
He said that South Africa’s late adoption has led to a leapfrogging of sorts, while the adoption curve remains at the beginning stages, especially for internal apps.
“While websites have always been hosted, in data centres, most businesses internationally have started with cloud for back up, development and disaster recovery purposes, for internal workloads,” Cruise explained.
He further added that South Africa’s late adoption has seen bypass cloud entry points and go straight to Infrastructure-as-a-service, specifically virtual private cloud. Although international businesses initially resisted embracing virtual private clouds in their infancy, local businesses are quite comfortable migrating production data centres into the cloud or even starting there instead of buying servers internally, he noted.
Cruise also said that there is a lot of cloud washing taking place and businesses need to be careful when making the decision about a cloud partner.
“We are seeing consultants who typically focus on areas such as IT services trying to profit off the burgeoning cloud market. The problem is that they are often not sufficiently funded and resourced, and can’t do the job that is required to make a cloud strategy a successful one. You also get the ‘one stop shop’ brands who try to sell an integrated service, which is most often not what it seems.”
According to him, the key to finding the right partner would be to look for a company that has solid partnerships with cloud specialist providers.
Speaking about the security, performance and availability, he said, “By far the most important is security. This involves not only the service provider securing the network and infrastructure, but also the customer securing their own environment.”
The data security also requires reliable backup, archiving and DR to counter ransomware and internal or external sabotage, he concluded.
Founded in 2016 in South Africa, Routed provides cloud and infrastructure solutions to enterprise customers, wholesale partners, resellers and affiliates.
