Cloud Hosting

Kathy Gibson reports The move to cloud is recognised as necessary for most organisations, but the journey to cloud is complex and can be challenging.

IDC held its Cloud and Datacentre Roadshow in Johannesburg today (15 March 2023) to examine some of the challenges and how companies can navigate them.

How well will your organisation be able to weather the next big crisis?

There are many business disruptors at work today, including power issues, the global pandemic, international wars and extreme weather. These are all pushing businesses to the wall, with many having closed their doors or in dire straits.

Thabiso Hlatshwayo, senior solution consulting manager at OpenText Africa, challenges CIOs to imagine a world without the Internet. Many of the applications that we rely on need the Internet to function, he points out, and we would be in a bad position without them. Indeed, the world today has pivoted to being always-on, always-connected and when this isnt available, businesses can crash.

The fastest pivot is still to come, Hlatshwayo says.

As we enter the era of quantum computing, we will see more innovations to come. But this could bring about what Hlatshwayo calls a nano-crisis, where the human-machine team will run the future-ready organisation.

Humans will not be able to solve the next crisis on their own: we will rely on the power of the human-machine team.

To survive the coming challenges, he recommends that companies start to work on building their human-machine teams. They need to be always-on, accessible to all and with flat structures, he adds.

Future-ready organisations will make information-powered decisions that are totally visible. This value-driven organisation will harness the existing structures and build on services available from other entities.

Its not that simple to just pick up applications and move them into the cloud which is why organisations that decide on a cloud-first strategy often find themselves in a state of cloud chaos.

Ian Jansen van Rensburg, SE director and chief technology officer of VMware SA, points out that simply deciding on a cloud-first strategy doesnt make it happen as companies could find themselves losing control of their apps and cloud infrastructure.

We say you need to be cloud-smart rather than cloud-first, he says. This involves putting a virtualisation layer between your premises and the cloud.

This will help organisations to pick the right cloud for the right app, with consistent management with security and control, and the cost-efficient use of private and public clouds.

So a new approach is required, with an abstraction layer to simplify and unify their datacentre environment.

This layer also needs to include an app platform, cloud management, cloud and edge infrastructure, security and networking, and an anywhere workspace.

VMware enables this by running the same cloud and edge infrastructure within the cloud data centres and the end users datacentre.

A number of hyperscaler clouds have entered the South African market, along with smaller and more specialised clouds. The question for many is whether there is room in the market for more cloud providers.

The main issue is to match business and IT requirements, says Jaap Scholten, head of group hybrid IT strategy at Datacentrix and chief operating officer at eNetworks.

Enterprises battle with the issues of exchange rates, data egress costs, and compliance questions around their data location and accessibility. And many cloud projects end up running over budget due to unanticipated complexity.

The golden thread here is data, he adds. Forget cloud-first put data first.

The three pillars that support a data strategy are where it lives, how it is transported, and how it is secured.

Where these overlap are the ACX (hosting and transport), zero trust (transport and security) and SOC (security and hosting).

These pillars are surrounded by services like desk-to-cloud, implementation, managed services and consulting services.

One cloud does not fit all, Scholten says. Organisations need to consider multi-cloud adoption, a fully-operational infrastructure, and a single point of management,

Datacentrix can build a cloud blueprint for companies that can be implemented on any cloud infrastructure.

The future of utilities is all about sustainability, building resilient operations, enabling resilience, and adapting to the evolving utility customer.

This is the word from Faith Burn, CIO of Eskom Holdings, who says a transition to digital business is key to meeting some of the challenges facing the utility. And cloud is vital for digitalisation, she adds.

Eskoms approach to the cloud starts with obtaining approval in line with critical infrastructure governance. This was led by an impactful first business case to prove the concept, which Eskom did with its Office 365 migration.

After this, the organisation needs to define a cloud strategy, then define the cloud roadmap. This is a significant job, Burn says, with the amount of applications within the organisation. There is the requirement to classify applications and then to determine what to do with these.

This is followed by vendor assessments per classification, then implementation and ongoing monitoring.

When you start with a cloud journey, it has to be business-driven, coupled with a pragmatic adoption and migration plan, Burn says.

Any project has to have clear objectives defined, having assessed classification and candidate groupings. Given the sovereignty requirements, a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud approach is important.

Its a journey, not an event, Burn concludes.

Applications can now live just about anywhere: on-premise, in the cloud, on the edge.

But this fosters a degree of complexity that plays out in security risks, operational complexity, misconfiguration, and the loss of visibility, according to Ajay Govind, systems engineer at Fortinet.

Many companies are now bringing their applications back into the edge to improve the user experience, which adds more challenges. CIOs also have to contend with misconfiguration of cloud security, insecure APIs, exfiltration of data, and unauthorised access to applications.

Overall, the move to digital transformation is increasing the number of applications and tools in the environment, making it more difficult to secure systems.

There can be no doubt that organisations are using hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, bringing with it challenges in the datacentre, the cloud, and on the edge.

Fortinet advocates a fabric solution for a secure application journey, offering a consistent, secured and optimised experience to build, deploy and run cloud applications across all cloud and hybrid environments.

Cloud is changing the way we live and work, with the edge a vital but often-overlooked part of this new reality.

Bevan Lock, senior sales engineer at Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions, believes the edge is becoming more important as organisations seek to bring their applications closer to the customer. The intelligent edge is quickly complementing the intelligent cloud as Internet of Things and ubiquitous communication increasingly provide the data that organisations need.

Part of being cloud smart is extending to the edge, bringing the compute to where the data is regardless of what kind of data, and where it is.

We cant afford the time and latency of moving that data around, or the cost of doing so, Lock says. We are seeing analytics and IoT quickly driving the edge, putting the applications at the point where we need them.

Lenovo delivers the solutions to enable that, Lock says.

Edge is no longer a trend that we can expect to see: already 52% of South African CIOs have made their first production deployments at the cloud edge, and a further 24% plant to do so in the next 12 months. At the same time, there has been an 800% increase in edge applications.

Challenges on the edge include environmental issues, management, applications, infrastructure, connectivity, security, and logistics.

Edge deployments are less predictable than traditional data centres, Lock adds. They can have exponential scale, be geographically distributed, and are typically quite complex. The edge will typically require a divide and conquer approach to filed support, with variable SLAs, and we are still figuring out he lifecycle management.

The edge computing value chain adds more complexity because large quantities of raw data are in many locations. Lenovo, Lock says, deploys a remote automated setup that is relatively simple to set up and deploy.

Technology and innovation is constant, with cloud now the de facto platform for future innovations.

Covid released budgets for cloud deployments which allowed CIOs to grow their cloud infrastructure, says Devi Moodley, CIO of the soon-to-be-launched Momentum Money. But the depressed economic environment is seeing those budgets being cut back.

The companies that have been able to complete their cloud migrations are able to demonstrate the benefits and they have a team of talented people on board.

Today, however, there is less money available for the cloud journey and CIOs have to rethink where they can go from here. In these circumstances, Moodley advises CIOs to embrace their inner chief financial officer (CFO).

Develop an in-depth understanding of your business objectives and strategic priorities for the next five years, she says. At the same time, move your positioning in the organisation to a more strategic role. This means you need to understand where the business is going and what will deliver the most benefit.

Look at the probability of success, and consider the risk appetite, she adds. Then you can determine what the roadmap should be realigned to.

Once on the journey, Moodley says CIOs should continuously evaluate during and after the implementation if the expected benefits are being realised and have the strength to step away if the answer is no.

The good thing is that this is not a capital investment, so the CFO wont bite your head off.

The architecture of any cloud project should be simplified, and the CIO should ensure they understand how it will behave in the cloud before they deploy it. Architect for value generation, Moodley says.

She adds that software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) may seem more expensive, but their total cost of ownership and ease of use saves in the long-run. At the same time, CIOs can use more cost-effective services, and should use built-in security and maintenance features wherever possible.

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