By Todd Schoeman – Channel partners are a fundamental component of enabling corporates across industry sectors to overcome the challenges associated with migrating to multi-cloud environments.
As more companies embrace the shift to digital platforms, they require solutions that can build on existing legacy investments while ensuring employees remain productive regardless of their geographic location.
Those businesses who are going to be successful will be the ones that participate in distributed digital ecosystems that are connected across core infrastructure to the edge and the cloud. This empowers them to engage effectively across their supply chain consisting of a hybrid workforce, partners, and customers.
The critical ingredient to realising this vision is to have access to a channel environment where partners and their customers can work together to navigate the complexities of a hybrid cloud world.
Flexibility to adapt
The hybrid cloud delivers companies the choice, flexibility, and scalability to align their strategic goals more rapidly to the demands of their customers. Increasingly, businesses will rely on the hybrid cloud to connect the applications, data, systems, and employees essential to realise a digital vision.
The means to do this as optimally as possible, lies in the digital interconnection platforms that exist between clouds. Of course, this also relies on the carrier and public cloud partnerships and alliances that are developed to unlock value. Having the right channel partners in place to facilitate this and leverage their expertise and relationships will enable organisations to benefit from the cloud faster than what was possible before.
Having an integrated environment complemented by cloud-centric network services that provide access into places while reducing the complexity of managing end point devices, the myriad of connections going into the organisational back-end systems and taking care of the security and regulatory requirements will be the cornerstone for success.
Just one example of this can be found in cloud edge services that will drive the next generation of cloud connectivity to deliver a user-friendly, managed multi-cloud networking environment.
Overcoming legacy limitations
The past two years have seen many local companies pushing cloud transformation and getting the basics in place to remain operational. While they have done the straightforward lifting and shifting of some legacy applications into the cloud, there are still a significant number of aging systems still in place that have not made the transition.
That leaves the legacy applications that need such significant modifications it amounts to a rebuild if they are to run natively in the cloud. Unfortunately, there is not a quick or easy fix to address this. Because these applications are interwoven into the fabric of the company’s operational structure, many businesses do not have the skills to manage this transformation.
Turning to the channel and partners who have the necessary detailed understanding of public cloud and how to transform applications to maximise cloud benefits become a significant competitive advantage. Refactoring these applications demands intricate levels of planning. Working with a trusted partner is therefore vital if the business is to unlock the potential of all its data and systems.
Additionally, the shift of IT to the cloud and the growth of cloud-native solutions are driving connectivity requirements beyond traditional WAN-to-cloud services. Corporate networks must be integrated more tightly into the platforms that connect ecosystems of cloud and technology providers. This is key to achieve the performance, scale, flexibility, security, and cost management needed to support accelerated digital transformation. Again, this is where having the right partner in place can deliver the competitive edge.
The channel is inextricably linked to business success in the digital world. Companies must now embrace these partners to remain innovative.
Todd Schoeman is the BT client business director in South Africa