The advent of the ‘Uber era’ has traditional businesses running scared. While business disruption isn’t new, the world is now seeing a perfect storm of accelerated technology innovation and rapidly changing consumer expectations that’s bringing unprecedented disruption and threatening established players across all markets. Very often one finds that the fear of the unknown or a reliance on ‘the way it has always been done’ are factors preventing organisations from challenging the status quo. This outdated thinking is dangerous in business today, where virtually overnight, organisations find themselves competing against newly formed, extremely agile competitors with the means to provide the...
Companies across South Africa and the world are discovering that cloud computing is a pretty neat way to procure the services necessary to do business. Cost consistently comes up as the primary advantage of cloud solutions – but they have many benefits beyond the price tag. Not only do cloud services solve problems for businesspeople, they also address common gripes for those tasked with managing the IT department. When it comes to Enterprise Resource Planning in the cloud, it makes administrators’ lives (and those of users) a whole lot easier. Check out these top five headaches for which cloud...
New ideas are often opposed before they are adopted. When new ideas are ultimately embraced, and lead to success, it’s always as if this opposition never existed at all. The growth of the cloud is happening in the same way. The opposition is fading away and again adoption is leading to spectacular results. These results are in the form of new businesses, launched on a credit card budget, enterprises speeding up innovation, and experimenting quicker, and governments giving more services to citizens, more often. What this all means is those who don’t adopt the cloud, may eventually fall behind...
The advantage of being in this industry for a while is that you get to see first-hand how things change, mostly for the better, and usually quite quickly, too. Some of these changes have a knock-on effect on other parts of the industry. One recent example of this is security. In days gone by, security was very much focused within a company’s network; all the necessary data and applications sat behind the firewall, so that’s where defences were concentrated. These days, that’s simply not the case. Thanks to a raft of industry developments – primarily mobile devices and cloud...
Notwithstanding the soft-edged depiction of “the cloud” on network diagrams, it is neither a fuzzy (ill-defined) nor a fluffy (hyped) concept. It is easy to understand and it is big, big business. Practically everything IT, from server infrastructure to applications to development platforms, is already in the cloud and available as a service to anyone with an Internet connection. Why is cloud such a big story? 1. It is possible At the most basic level, the reason why such a vast range of services is migrating online is because it is now a practical possibility. Faster Internet speeds – fixed and...
n the quest to remain competitive within the market, businesses are introducing more and more innovative applications to improve processes and efficiency. However, maintaining this progress requires companies to have full control of spending on data centres – something that is often challenging for many businesses. But the advent of hybrid cloud migration now allows companies to combine private data centres with public cloud resources to form a unique hybrid cloud environment. By migrating applications to cloud services based on certain criteria, such as data protection policies, legal agreements and whether the application can be supported by cloud...
Cloud, schmoud, right? If you’ve been nodding your head sagely anytime the cloud comes up, while quietly thinking to yourself “what does cloud even mean?”, rest assured you’re not alone. No clear definition of cloud computing is still very much a challenge, and is partially down to "cloudwashing" -- calling anything and everything “cloud computing”. This is according to David Mitchell Smith, vice president and Gartner Fellow at Gartner Research, speaking at the recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2015 in Cape Town. Some more reassurance: according to Smith, the number one inquiry at Gartner is "what’s a cloud strategy and how do...
Whatever the size or specialty, manufacturing companies across Africa are under pressure to grow revenues, reduce costs and increase profitability. Yet many of them are constrained from achieving these goals by years of under-investment in technology. Struggling with legacy systems and manual processes, they lack the business insights, streamlined business processes, and supply chain integration that will allow them to accelerate growth while reducing their cost basis. With margins under pressure, many African manufacturers have not had the appetite for large-scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) initiatives. They have feared that the consulting and infrastructure costs would be prohibitive, that the implementation...
Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen the business software market evolve at a rapid speed, moving from basic DOS-based solutions with text-based interfaces to rich and attractive graphical user interfaces. Now we’re seeing the next shift in the market as businesses start to transition away from running software on their own standalone PCs or servers towards accessing it online as a cloud service. Cloud computing is essentially all about the move away from buying a software suite that you install on your computer towards accessing the software you need over the Internet and on a web browser, wherever...
Clunky spreadsheets. Cluttered network drives. Unmanageable mailboxes. Issues that many businesses have in common. It’s also important to point out that email, once seen as the saviour, is not a business process contrary to the way many might try to use it. In the era of cloud-computing solutions like Asana and Podio have been quick to jump on the collaboration bandwagon – aiming to help businesses get organised and work better together. It’s also something that SharePoint has been doing within bigger businesses for more than a decade. Now that it’s available as part of Office 365, it’s certainly worth exploring this versatile...
Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs released a study which projected that spending on cloud computing infrastructure and platforms will grow at a 30% compound annual growth rate from 2013 through 2018, compared with five percent growth for the overall enterprise IT market. This is a staggering number, and reflects the growing importance of cloud computing in the enterprise IT equation. Along with such growth, however, come a host of service providers with varying quality and credibility. As a result, in a landscape that is becoming increasingly crowded and competitive, choosing the right supplier is critical. For business leaders taking...
Today’s businesses generate more data than ever before, forcing them to back up their information more often. While the weekly tape backup might have worked a decade ago for files and servers, it doesn’t anymore. This is because tape backup does not accommodate the software and service component of online applications like Office 365, Salesforce and Google Docs. As more vendors move their services into the cloud, it makes sense for modern businesses to ditch tape backup in favour of the cloud. Here are some of the ways cloud solutions overcome tape restrictions. Cloud covers all the bases Tapes can only back up...
In the past 18 months we have seen cloud computing enabling great innovations both in consumer and enterprise products as it has become the new normal for organisations of all sizes. Cloud is now the engine room for inventions by young businesses as well as transforming established companies into lean, fast moving innovators. It is safe to say cloud computing is already having a broad impact. Despite all of the amazing innovation we have already seen, we are still on Day One. In the second half of 2015 and beyond cloud will power exciting innovations...
Cloud data services are growing extremely rapidly as users around the web utilize the cloud to improve internal sharing, data analysis and grow the overall businesses. Optimizing cloud services is becoming more critical which has in turn made choosing rules regimes or self-service analytics very important. At the same time, data is growing exponentially which means that administrators must get a handle on their analysis methodology before the volume of data gets out of control. Industry giants such as Salesforce and Zendesk are using cloud data services as well. Salesforce and Zendesk integration for third party standards...
Compared with IT even 18 months ago, we’ve come a long way. The hybrid enterprise is the new kid on the block – largely due to advances in ‘as-a-service’ solutions changing the way organisations approach their storage, application management and networks. It’s important to first clarify what we mean by the hybrid enterprise. In short, it is a mix of on-premise and cloud/SaaS apps that use MPLS and public Internet connections. The data and applications are located in a combination of data centres, branch offices or the cloud, depending on which location is most efficient for them to run...
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