Cloud adoption brings shared advantage

Riaan Pietersen, General Manager, Wanatel.

---

There’s an enormous amount of data centre space going into South Africa – witness to enterprises accelerating their digital transformation strategies and placing a greater focus on cloud adoption strategies.

SA now has over 50 operational data centres, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Africa Data Centres, Acronis, Oracle and Dimension Data, to name just a few. The IDC State of Cybersecurity in South Africa report recently showed that nearly half (48%) of organisations in the country are using cloud as a platform and driver of digital innovation. The public cloud services market alone is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.5% through 2025, up from $1.6 billion in 2021.

These new, and world-class, facilities provide excellent opportunity across the board. Retail, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services and more will benefit from the value and benefits of the increased data centre capacity and therefore cloud computing.

One clear benefit of this expanding market is the ability to leverage shared infrastructure in the telephony space. Voice over internet protocol (VOIP) in the cloud (often referred to as hosted PBX or cloud PBX) offers reliable phone systems, providing flexibility and scalability while also maintaining low costs.

Wanatel, a leading VOIP wholesale provider in South Africa, comments that the expansion in cloud adoption has been a catalyst for growth in the VOIP reseller channel and bodes well for the future.

“Businesses are able to take the pain out of infrastructure management, security concerns and talent acquisition when they leverage cloud services like a cloud PBX,” says Wanatel General Manager Riaan Pietersen.

Traditional servers for PBXes are expensive and require expert maintenance, but a cloud PBX uses IP-based telephony to provision and access services.

Wanatel hosts, maintains and secures VOIP networks for its resellers. By tapping into a wholesaler, resellers entrust the ownership of the network, the management of equipment, hosting of the service and handling of upgrades to a larger player, leaving them to focus on what they do best – servicing their clients.

“It’s like outsourcing an entire telephony system to technical experts – without having to worry about the servers or the technicians to maintain it,” says Pietersen.

Using a cloud PBX can be extremely cost-effective and scalable.

With cloud-based VOIP, the central intelligence of the telephone system resides in the service provider’s secure data centre.

However, Pietersen cautions, VOIP must be deployed and configured correctly to be secure against cyber threats.

“Attackers leverage cloud-based services in a fraudulent way to boost their attack capability. We’re constantly on guard against this and deploy a multi-layered approach with our experts who are dedicated to one thing – protecting the network. That leaves our resellers, and their clients, safe to continue with their business.”

Pietersen concludes that cloud PBX technology can help businesses avoid large capital investments, ongoing maintenance and high IT expenses for staffing and training, if it is hosted by a reliable network provider who invests in securing and maintaining their infrastructure and quality of network.