Page 18 - Issue 3 2023

CLOUD ON-PREM

Cloud revolution enables businesses

to leverage cloud while using

on-prem systems

By Udhveer Sookraj, data integration specialist at Insight Consulting

oving to the cloud certainly compliance headaches. closer to home any business can attest
makes sense from an African Before we get there, let’s take a to the pain caused by our unreliable
Mbusiness perspective, look at the context in Africa generally energy grid. During load shedding, and
despite some serious challenges and and South Africa specifically. Until the sometimes unplanned outages that
risk factors unique to these shores. the last few years, there hasn’t follow the power cuts as a result of
However, not all businesses can take been a great deal of infrastructure poor infrastructure, communications
the plunge. Some businesses are investment on these shores by the often grind to a halt and technology
reliant on expensive legacy systems key cloud players. While we have seen becomes unavailable.
that work well for them, while others this change recently with substantial An enterprise business which runs
are dissuaded from the move because Microsoft and Amazon Web Services on-prem solutions needs to invest in
of budgetary and compliance concerns. investments, we are also seeing the hardware as well as a connectivity
Luckily, a revolution in how cloud uptake of other providers such as solution. This entire setup runs on
computing is approached means Snowflake and MogoDB Atlas, which power and so now there is an extra
businesses not quite ready to migrate offer more cost-effective cloud-based investment needed: backup power
to the cloud fully can extract the solutions. in the form of generators, solar,
benefits of being in the cloud while There’s little denying that the batteries and UPS systems, which are
still using their own on-prem systems, time has arrived for Africa to be a all expensive. Essentially, this means
which effectively redoubles security global player and not just a consumer. that if a business made an investment
efforts and removes legislative Challenges make this difficult, and in a data centre two years ago, it

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