Advantages of cloud migration

That's according to Robyn Milham, Head of Enterprise Sales for Southern Africa at Research In Motion (RIM), the company behind the BlackBerry solution. She says enterprise users especially are adopting the cloud as a way to drive down IT operations costs, improve the resilience and flexibility of their IT infrastructures and ensure that their users have access to mission-critical data applications and data wherever they are.

Research from IDC indicates that 63% of South African companies have already started moving some applications to the cloud or plan to do so soon.

Three cloud-based services launched

"The technology behind cloud computing is not completely new," says Milham. "We have used a cloud-like infrastructure for more than ten years to deliver services such as push email and BBM to BlackBerry smartphone subscribers. But we are now seeing more applications move to the cloud as the mobile network infrastructure improves and businesses become more reliant on a range of mobile business applications."

The company launched three new cloud-based services to help businesses of all sizes to secure, manage and control smartphones in the cloud. It is also working with partners such as Microsoft to align its solutions with their cloud-based services.