The EOH Group’s iOCO has received the coveted Amazon Web Services (AWS) 2022 SSA Rising Star of the Year Award, which recognises the ICT business as a leader in providing cloud migration and other AWS services to customers across business sectors in sub-Saharan Africa.
iOCO is a proud AWS Advanced Partner and member of the AWS Partner Network, which includes technology providers that specialise in AWS services. It serves its South African and international clients through the expertise of its teams based in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Prague and the Middle East.
Paul Spagnoletti, iOCO’s Business Unit Executive of Cloud and Security South Africa, says it is a great honour for iOCO to receive the accolade from AWS, the world’s leading hyperscale cloud provider, which brought cloud computing and network infrastructure services on a large scale to South Africa four years ago.
“The Rising Star of the Year Award signals that iOCO is a trusted partner of AWS, which has the largest market share in cloud computing services in the world and boasts a rapidly growing market in southern Africa. The award highlights that we have heavily invested in our AWS practice since AWS launched its infrastructure in Africa in 2018. We have introduced Amazon CloudFront to our South African and international clients and invested in our local and international teams to ensure we provide seamless cloud services to all our markets.”
Spagnoletti says iOCO sees the cloud as the key enabler for any business undertaking a digital transformation journey. For this reason, iOCO has developed its competency as an AWS partner that supports customers throughout their cloud migration journey, from assessing their information technology environment, developing a strategic roadmap for the migration and determining their cloud readiness, through to moving into readiness for using the cloud.
iOCO’s cloud capabilities and migration approach
As an AWS partner, iOCO delivers professional and billing services to AWS customers, providing them with a turnkey AWS solution. The company has obtained certifications for cloud migrations, windows migrations and end-user computing and WorkSpaces. In the area of cloud migration, iOCO boasts the capability to move any type of workload or application to the cloud.
“COVID-19 and the presence of AWS in South Africa have led businesses in the region to move to the cloud at an accelerated pace because there is a business imperative for digital transformation and a realisation that the cloud is a key enabler of this. Organisations have become more aware of the versatility, agility, scalability and other business benefits that the cloud offers, and importantly, that it reduces costs. Businesses need partners to make the migration journey and iOCO has built a great track record in this area,” says Spagnoletti.
iOCO takes a customer-centric approach to moving workloads to the cloud, starting by considering the client’s technology strategy, before assessing the applications and workloads that exist within the organisation and applying the global methodology of the seven Rs: retire, retain, relocate, re-host, repurchase, re-platform or refactor.
The company first sets out to determine whether it is optimal to run a client’s workload using a traditional data centre, on the iOCO cloud (or a private cloud platform), a hyperscale public cloud like AWS, which is iOCO’s leading go-to-market partner, or a combination of platforms. In many cases, iOCO goes the route of hyperscale, which allows it to provide value-added AWS services like AI, machine learning, automation, analytics and data lakes, and even to deploy internet of things solutions on AWS.
The result is that iOCO extends the benefits of applications living on the cloud for its customers through its implementation of Amazon’s offering of emerging technologies. A traditional data centre simply does not have the capability to offer these value-added services, nor the scalability of a hyperscale provider like AWS.
“We are excited about what Amazon brings as our strategic go-to-market choice. AWS offers significantly more infrastructure and emerging technology services and features through their local data centre compared to other hyperscalers,” says Richard Vester, Head of iOCO’s Global AWS practice. “In addition, they are storing customers’ data within South Africa’s borders, making it easy to use their services and removing many sovereignty issues for local customers.
“The majority of local businesses are still in the process of migrating to the cloud. However, once they have completed this journey, adapted to their new IT environment and started using the best-in-class emerging technologies offered by AWS, their speed to market is significantly enhanced. This is one of the notable benefits of digital transformation.”
iOCO’s 2022 SSA Rising Star Award signals that the group has achieved its first objective in the cloud arena of becoming an excellent migration partner of AWS. The group is now looking forward to becoming a prominent managed services partner of the hyperscale provider, expanding its services to sub-Saharan African and international clients.
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iOCO – ioco.tech
iOCO, a proudly EOH company, is an end-to-end systems integrator. It focuses on digital business transformation through the delivery of functional outcomes across the wide spectrum of industries and business processes covering IT & OT applications, and automation.
Our client value proposition is framed around working with our clients on understanding their most complex business challenges, to assist them in framing their business transformation journey.
iOCO focuses on two key areas:
Digital business transformation through the delivery of functional outcomes across the wide spectrum of industries and business processes covering IT & OT applications, and automation; and managing and optimising the IT engine room with efficiency and operational excellence at the core of delivering technology platform transformation, through IT service automation and a journey to hybrid cloud computing.
EOH
EOH is one of Africa's largest technology services providers and has a wide range of solutions in Industry Consulting, IT Services, Software, Industrial Technologies and Business Process Outsourcing. The Group continues to be a market leader in its core ICT businesses which operates principally under the iOCO brand name. The nature of this business is systemic to both the public and private sector and is an integral technology partner for a number of South Africa’s leading JSE-listed, blue-chip companies as well as key metros and government departments. It’s other business, NEXTEC, collaborates with world-leading technology providers to design, implement and manage intelligent value-adding infrastructure and people solutions that make a positive and lasting impact.