Are South African organisations making use of the cloud as their long-term home for backed up data?
This, and other questions, will be examined as ITWeb, in partnership with Pure Storage, conducts an online survey to discover how local companies are approaching their cloud adoption strategies.
The Cloud Adoption Survey will run for two weeks and aims to establish how confident South African companies are in their ability to recover their business data at any time, efficiently and cost-effectively.
"As the hyperscalers and local cloud vendors ramp up their presence and portfolios, we're very interested to see how South African customers are gearing up to take advantage of these new models, as well as understanding what customers consider inhibitors to cloud access," says Patrick Smith, EMEA field CTO at Pure Storage.
Among other things, the survey aims to find out what types of applications are typically being run in the cloud, and what companies believe are the pros and cons of cloud computing.
"Pure Storage sees the future of cloud adoption not as an either/or situation, involving on-premises or the public cloud, but rather, inclusive of both solutions, in a hybrid cloud environment," notes Smith. "Customers are beginning to see the cloud is not purpose-built for enterprise applications, and enterprise infrastructure isn't as user-friendly as the cloud."
Smith believes there are huge cost and efficiency benefits that can be derived from analysing the benefits of both options, as well as the risks of major cost overruns. His view is that modern IT environments should consist of data strategies based on flexible consumption models across on-premises, hosted and public cloud, aligning application workloads with the most effective infrastructure. Crucially, modern IT environments should work in tandem with a common management interface, 100% non-disruptive architecture and proactive/predictive support services.
When it comes to the challenges of cloud adoption, Smith says time, cost and security are the most common challenges. "Moving data is a slow process, because it requires a lot of bandwidth and man-hours. There are also security doubts, and companies often prefer to keep their data on local servers. Overcoming these concerns are the main challenges."
In Smith's opinion, when it comes to cloud adoption, the biggest challenge is not technology, but the people and processes that must change and adapt.
"This takes time and limits the effectiveness of cloud adoption," he notes. "Younger companies and those with tech innovation test centres can make this transition easier. The biggest enterprises will have a 'long tail' transition when it comes to full cloud adoption."
Share your views on cloud adoption by completing the quick surveyhere, and you could win a Volkano Laptop Bag, plus extras.
The results of this survey, together with the name of the lucky draw winner, will be published on ITWeb.
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