By Refiloe Oliphant – The agility, innovation, and cost-effectiveness of going the cloud route have resulted in more local companies embracing it for business applications and advanced analytics. For the channel in South Africa, this has seen a shift to deliver cloud solutions as the means to strengthen the existing on-premises investments of customers.
According to McKinsey & Company, 70% of companies using cloud technology plan to increase their cloud budgets. The public cloud computing market is projected to grow to $800 billion by 2024, with implementations across all industries – retail, media, telecom, education, banking, insurance, and more.
Clearly, the cloud has become the preferred environment as organisations accelerate their modernisation and digitalisation efforts.
Security concerns
However, for local companies, security remains a concern especially compared to the control they had with their on-premises environment. Public cloud vendors and software-as-a-service providers have security certifications. Even so, the channel must prioritise educating customers on the security requirements of the cloud. While the same principles apply when it comes to the importance of safeguarding data, there are different nuances to consider in the cloud. For example, misconfigurations on cloud-based data centres could have significant security implications for companies. The channel therefore needs to provide customers with solutions that help allay their fears when it comes to migrating sensitive data and applications to hybrid environments.
Important to remember is that using analytics in the cloud introduces no more risk than any other workload. For analytics to be effective it needs a lot of data. This is where the strength of the cloud comes in. Many local companies are still concerned about the use of data beyond their on-premises data centre. So, while momentum for the cloud is growing with other solutions, it is still relatively slow when it comes to data migration. This will continue to have an impact on the kinds of services and solutions the channel offers especially when it comes to analytics.
Analytical power
One of the main reasons why companies are transitioning their analytics to the cloud despite compliance concerns is that the environment delivers scalable data storage and compute. Furthermore, the pay-as-you-go model, coupled with the attraction of cost control and reducing the total cost of ownership gives decision-makers are more reasons to move to the cloud.
The channel must follow suit and start delivering solutions that deliver effective ways for businesses to analyse data in the cloud while also ticking all the required regulatory boxes. Many might think that moving analytics to the cloud should be easy because it is a stand-alone workload and potentially easier to relocate.
This has been the case for other discrete activities such as human resources and expense processing which have enjoyed early cloud adoption. However, much of the discussion around legacy integration has been about the location of data, rather than the software or hardware used to manage it.
Analytics relies on data and ideally a business would want to run analytics as close to the data as possible. While one can deploy a cloud-based analytics platform that uses on-premises data, a lot of time can be spent shunting data back and forth. There are ingress and egress costs for these data transfers to consider. If the volumetrics are modest or where the computing effort of the analytics far exceeds the transfer time, this remains a viable approach.
Ultimately, the channel can play an important part in repositioning data analytics offerings in the hearts and minds of customers turning to the cloud.
Refiloe Oliphant is the channel and alliance specialist for SAS in South Africa