As hybrid working becomes the trend for South African companies of all sizes, the way their data is created, handled, stored and protected is changing too.
Michael Finch, enterprise technology manager at Rectron South Africa, points out that when employees all work at the company’s premises, their devices are connected to centralised networking, storage, backup, security and management.
Today, they are just as likely to be working from home, or even from the local coffee shop, so these services are not easily available.
“At Rectron we have built up a stable of solutions that address all these issues,” Finch explains. “We help customers to manage the user experience, ensuring that data created outside the company is properly protected, securely backed up and available for the user.
“For the company, we help them to centralise data storage so it’s available for reporting and analytics.”
Rashaad Farred, cloud business development manager at Rectron South Africa, adds: “We assist our partners to understand the evolution of storage. We have tackled the challenge holistically, from the PC that stores the files, moving to external devices like network-attached storage, and from there, cloud and hybrid cloud as offered by Microsoft Azure and OneDrive.”
He explains that Rectron has put together a portfolio of solutions that work with one another to provide a seamless user experience, and that comply with companies’ regulations, processes and procedures.
“We also help to advise and implement these solutions for our partners, ensuring the end user also gets the best, safest and most cost-effective option with all the security and compliance built in.”
Finch hastens to add that cost-effective doesn’t necessarily mean cheap. “The industry needs to challenge the concept of cost-effective: the rand per gigabyte cost is one thing; but the rand per gigabyte that is robust, secure and easily accessible is another conversation.”
Among the solutions that Rectron offers to ensure safe and reliable storage and backup are Microsoft Azure for Cloud storage, Acronis for cyber protection and backup and Lenovo for local storage. In addition, it has invested in the Interworks integration platform that delivers across the globe, allowing partners to add or remove licenses on the fly, and to size cloud storage as required.
Microsoft
Microsoft Azure has an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help organisations meet their business challenges. It gives customers the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive, global network using their favourite tools and frameworks.
Microsoft Azure includes virtual machines, backup and disaster recovery, databases, development and testing services to name a few.
Mandi Matthews, Cloud Solutions Architect at Rectron South Africa, explains that the Rectron team is on hand to help partners craft solutions for their customers, and to provide services on their behalf.
“We have pre-sales engineers and solution architects who can advise and, once a solution is implemented, can do first-tier support.”
Azure is not intended to replace traditional storage, but to complement and improve them, Matthews says.
“Most companies today are looking at CapEx versus OpEx solutions and perceive traditional storage solutions as being expensive and resource-intensive to maintain.
Microsoft has invested in data centres in South Africa, customers can be assured of data sovereignty, which overcomes many compliance and regulatory concerns.
As well as taking advantage of the highly available and redundant Azure infrastructure because of the different regions, availability zones, etc.
A typical example would be that by default Azure Storage accounts replicate data three times within a primary region.
Not forgetting that Security is at the top of any organization’s list, Microsoft Azure has many Security services to help protect client resources running on Azure.
The hybrid cloud discussion is currently trending because it offers companies a way of “sweating” their legacy on-prem hardware while building out a cloud migration strategy.”
A Hybrid cloud offers a solution to many of the challenges around remote working, Matthews adds. “Covid-19 showed customers that they are not as agile as they thought they were. The ability to create virtual desktop interfaces (VDIs) means employees can continue to work from anywhere and their companies can continue to protect their assets.”
The hybrid cloud also offers companies a business continuity solution for when their on-prem environment goes down.
Below are some of the Key Drivers for cloud migration from both Microsoft and Rectron.
- Addressing Datacenter contract expiration
- Improving cash flow
- Managing constrained budgets
- Ensuring business continuity
- Defending against cybersecurity threats
- Scaling resources and infrastructure
- Application innovation
Acronis
Acronis Cyber Protect delivers data protection that meets today’s demands, keeping customers’ businesses running, protecting any workload, scaling without limits, and saving money.
The solution set offers full availability, with no downtime, ensuring business continuity by recovering from a disaster in seconds – or proactively avoiding downtime.
Complete protection, forever, is possible because Acronis Cyber Protect keeps every bit of data protected no matter what technology is used, or how much data is generated.
And fast backup means non-stop business operations, with the ability to run backups as often as needed with no impact on overall performance. This improves a company’s RPO (Recovery Point Objectives) and saves money in case of disaster.
Acronis Cyber Protect sets a high bar for new-generation data protection, offering proactive ransomware protection, instant restore, complete protection, unmatched simplicity, hybrid cloud architecture and even blockchain notarization.
Acronis Cyber Files Cloud provides office and mobile users with safe file access, sync, and share in an easy-to-use, complete, and secure hosted cloud solution.
It provides secure methods for users to share content across any device; in-transit and on-device encryption; user controls for working with and sharing files/folders; and offers an enterprise-class audit trail to manage users, applications, and data.
The deep functionality of Acronis Cyber Files Cloud improves mobile employee productivity by allowing them to work from various mobiles devices and integrating with native Microsoft Office mobile apps as well as offering powerful PDF annotation and editing. Overall, it delivers a rich mobile client experience, including bookmarks and on- and two-way synchronisation.
Akhona Nkalitshane, Acronis product manager at Rectron South Africa, explains that services like Acronis offer more than just backup into the cloud. “Companies need to secure their data on the cloud and on their local infrastructure, ensuring that it is protected wherever it resides.
“It’s important for partners to understand each customer’s specific needs: what kind of scalability they require, what infrastructure is involved, and how time-sensitive their backup and restore needs to be.
“Whether your storage is in the cloud or on-premise we can ensure it is backed up and protected across all the layers where it moves or resides.”
Lenovo
With Lenovo’s data centre storage solutions, customers can keep thier data available, accessible, and secure at all time.
The ability to distribute, protect, analyse, and manage data is vital to an organisation’s business and customer success strategy.
Whether data is managed at the edge, in the data centre, or across hybrid, multi-cloud environments, the storage infrastructure must have the ability to elastically scale across clouds, quickly deploy new services and efficiently process growing amounts of data.
Modernising the data management infrastructure requires solutions that can scale, accelerate, and protect data with new simplified designs and affordable consumption models to lower risk and cost.
Lenovo’s smarter infrastructure solutions for data management deliver industry-leading, tailored, scalable end-to-end storage and data management solutions that help customers:
Accelerate application performance to deliver faster results.
Simplify data management across hybrid, multi-cloud environments and workloads.
Optimise data protection and management to reduce costs and increase ROI.
Greg Pothitos, channel manager for Lenovo South Africa’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, explains the Lenovo’s storage devices that are ready to integrate with the cloud.
“They are purpose-built so there is no issues around get data on-premise backed up effectively to the cloud.”
He stresses that Lenovo is a hardware provider, building tailored systems that work with the world’s leading software providers. In a way, we can say that Lenovo is totally software agnostic and is not bound by any legacy software, making their ability to develop tailored solutions to fit every customer need an advantage.
“We provide the building blocks to the cloud,” he explains. “We work with partners like Microsoft, VMware and Nutanix to provide the infrastructure for the hybrid cloud and hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI).
“We provide the Lego blocks for all storage tiers and platforms, ensuring the best performance and reliability for every solution.
“And it goes without saying the Lenovo offers the best hardware products in the market, and has been voted as the most reliable and secure server infrastructure for the last seven years,” Pothitos adds.
“Lenovo offers five-time the reliability of comparable products that are more expensive, providing infrastructure that is fluid and flexible. This is very important to our customers as any down time of service can costs businesses thousands if not millions.”
Why partner with Rectron?
Rectron is committed to partnering with channel partners to drive successful and profitable partnerships for all.
Here are some of the reasons that our customers choose to partner with Rectron:
- 25 years of great service and counting
- We provide a wide range of solutions
- Knowledgeable and passionate teams
- Rectron Zone – our digital-first portal
- We save you time and money with free deliveries.
- Decisions are made quickly to serve you better
- Trust in our national footprint
- Systems designed to speed up service time
- The best technical service team in town
- Drive your business forward with marketing. Do you love how marketing communications and want to replicate this for your business? Our dedicated marketing department can assist with creative solutions for your business to draw the right audience for your business.
For more information on Rectron and its storage offerings, visit www.rectron.co.za