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ICT

Going beyond a multi-tenancy

way of thinking

By Heman Kassan, Chief Commercial Officer of Technodyn

s software starts moving to clouds like AWS, Azure, and Google, South African
companies no longer need to be concerned about physical servers and local storage
Afor their applications. Instead, the focus turns to leveraging the likes of containers
and Kubernetes to unlock business growth for a digital environment.
Beyond that, concepts such as virtualised infrastructure, serverless computing, platform-
as-a-service, and others will become the means to gain a strategic advantage.
Now, applications can more efficiently share resources and platform servers with
thousands of others without requiring local developers to re-architect or create the
solutions themselves. Suddenly, it is less about application-level multi-tenancy and more
about improving critical areas such as data privacy.
Think about the services
With multi-tenancy no longer the deciding factor when it comes to applications, decision-
makers need to turn their attention to the service attributes delivered by the cloud
environment. This requires a re-examination of how they approach service providers.
Of course, there is no ‘correct’ way to do this as the needs of each company will differ
even if they share the same industry sector. Rather, business and technology leaders need
to ask questions about how well the business data is shielded from other companies sharing Heman Kassan
the platform. This is an essential part of regulatory requirements.
Furthermore, does the environment enable self-service and automation to empower the
company to manage its applications, services, and data more optimally? Along with this, the Always about the customer
business must remain in full control to manage any changes required and be able to migrate The business must therefore go beyond
data to other environments should this be required. This level of agility brings with it the the products and services on offer and
means to customise the applications to fit the needs of the business, as opposed to having consider how it makes the customer
the organisation change how it does things to suit the application. think and feel. At a basic level, most
Resource efficiency must be a given, especially regarding containers and Kubernetes. But companies offer the same thing. Yes,
with this comes the ability to cost-effectively control and manage the cloud budget to avoid there might be subtle differences, but
feature-creep and bill shock at the end of the month. Flexibility and control are therefore it all comes down to fulfilling the same
two golden threads tying everything together in a post-multi-tenancy world. needs. The differentiator is hidden in the
There is simply no reason to have multi-tenancy built into applications in the main, experiences the products and services
however, there are exceptions. For instance, in high-volume consumer freemium services, deliver to customers.
there might be millions of free accounts that are used infrequently. In this regard, multi- Just as life beyond multi-tenancy
tenancy will come at a much lower cost than trying to keep everything in the cloud, gives organisations the flexibility of self-
especially when the services are not used that often. service and automation in the cloud, they
must also provide their customers with
An experience to remember user-friendly services that can translate
With digital transformation seeing companies of all shapes and sizes across South Africa into self-service and automation for the
reconsidering their technology and cloud approaches, the world beyond multi-tenancy is end user.
now within their grasp. Crucially, all these changes are done to serve the customer better. If local businesses are to be successful
And that is where the balance needs to come in. Technology is important, but digital in this post-pandemic world, they
transformation is also about people, strategy, and understanding what customers will pay must now listen to the customer and
for. This means that regardless of the cloud approach used and the digital transformation understand their expectations of what
projects embarked on - organisations must first have complete visibility of what it is their the organisation can provide them with.
customers want and how this will impact the stakeholders throughout the value chain. This can only be done effectively when
Crucially, digital transformation and going beyond multi-tenancy cannot be done as one- the company goes beyond multi-tenancy,
time activities. These are ongoing aspects that will be linked to the company as it grows and adopts a more agile approach to its
adapts to the world (and customer demands) around it. However, with this comes the ability business, and reassesses how it delivers
to be more flexible to change as needed. This is in stark contrast to the more traditional way products and services to end users for a
of ‘setting strategies in stone’ and almost forcing customers to go along for the ride. competitive advantage. n

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