Tag: Microsoft Azure

Businesses are increasingly moving to the cloud, not only to survive potential business disruptions, but to take advantage of the scalability, remote work enablement and cost efficiencies. Their investments into the cloud will help them refine and reimagine their digital strategies with an eye on remote productivity, sustainability, and security.

Cloud adoption, including hybrid and multi-cloud adoption is expanding fast among both private and public sector organisations of all sizes. At the enterprise level, we estimate that two-thirds of companies globally already use multiple clouds.

With the cloud services market expected to grow at a rate of 28% over the next five years to top R23 billion by 2023, South African companies have finally woken up to its potential. Providing some of the impetus behind this is the local availability of Microsoft Azure data centres.

Larry Bossidy, the former Chairman and CEO of Honeywell International Inc., captured what it takes to successfully execute strategy when he said, “Execution is the ability to mesh strategy with reality, align people with goals, and achieve the promised results.” He emphasised the critical role of people, as they are the enablers and implementors of strategy and this is true of a successful cloud enablement strategy.

The phrase ‘multi-cloud’ is surfacing often and for good reason: it’s part of cloud’s natural evolution. Multi-cloud is a very popular architecture among enterprises. A survey released by the IBM Institute for Business Value found that a staggering 85% of polled businesses use multi-cloud. South African businesses are already prolific adopters of cloud - at least 65% of local CIOs intend to invest in cloud during 2019 (IDC). A significant number of those deployments will be multi-cloud.

While moving to the cloud might be easier than overhauling on-premise systems, there are still obstacles to overcome. Many companies underestimate the costs of migration and the level of planning required.