Westcon partners explore local cloud landscape

Shapeblue and Citrix provided insights about what to look for, how to accelerate the enterprise's cloud strategy and provided practical staring points for the journey to the cloud. Shapeblue are expert builders of public and private clouds. They are also leading the independent global CloudStack/CloudPlatform integrator and consultancy.

Speakers at the event included Dan Crowe, managing consultant for Shapeblue South Africa and Giles Sirett, CEO and founder Shapeblue. First up, Crowe discussed what Shapeblue does, why they do it and the ins and outs of the cloud market at the moment.

The adoption trend for medium to large businesses in South Africa sees 50% using a kind of cloud service. Many businesses are still hesitant about cloud adoption because they question its trustworthiness, security and protection as well as worry about data location and interoperability.

Crowe suggests that businesses choose their cloud partners carefully and be aware of their capabilities. With regard to data location Crowe says that businesses can use localised cloud services, that will ensure that they know where their data is at all times and allows better planning for compliance.

The cloud will disrupt every vertical market and business process, which means that agility is absolutely critical if an enterprise is going to compete with other enterprises in the market. According to Crowe the worldwide numbers for enterprise cloud strategy see 74% of enterprises with multi-cloud solutions, 9% with single private, 13% with single public and 4% with no plans of implementing cloud at all.

Sirett then spoke around Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and gave case studies about the building of IaaS. He believes that the cloud has never been a CIO's business, which is why the migration of enterprises to the cloud is still a bit slow. The CIOs focus on business goals, but Sirett explains that what they do not understand is that the cloud can help them to meet business goals.

The cloud can help enterprises to create enterprise growth, deliver operational results, reduce enterprise costs and attract and retain new customers. The sooner enterprises in South Africa migrate to the cloud the sooner they will realise the business advantages.