As more South African organisations move to multicloud environments, finding the right clouds for various business use cases and linking them all for seamless management can be an onerous task.
Aiming to simplify the multicloud environment, CipherWave Business Solutions is partnering with selected hyperscalers such as Microsoft Azure and Huawei Cloud to expand its cloud capabilities and offer customers more choice.
Wayne D’sa, CEO of CipherWave, says: “As a cloud service provider who operates our own public cloud, we have seen a need to connect into hyperscaler public clouds to support our customers’ multicloud strategies.”
In doing so, CipherWave addresses the complexity of managing multiple clouds, the cost of data egress, the challenge of moving workloads between clouds and concerns about standardising security controls across multicloud environments.
The recent World Wide Worx Cloud in Africa 2023 research study found that local organisations are facing major multicloud challenges, including optimising performance, protecting applications from threats, adequate connectivity, applying consistent security policies, visibility into application health and determining which cloud is most cost-efficient.
D’sa says: “We are brokering for a select number of clouds. The benefit to the customer is that we are a partner with a widespread cloud footprint and the expertise to advise on the cloud environments best placed to meet their requirements. Because we have a direct connection to our hyperscaler partners, customers don’t have to pay for data transfer between those clouds. Within CipherWave OneCloud, we integrate and manage multicloud environments seamlessly and customers only have to deal with one service and billing provider.
“Ease of billing is one of the big advantages. In addition, we are building competency to offer a single pane of glass multicloud management environment.”
The benefits of multicloud
“Businesses today have so many options of clouds to use. What we’ve seen, as is the case with most situations, choice isn’t a bad thing when put to good use,” D’sa says.
“A multicloud strategy offers more flexibility to meet different scaling requirements and the ability to minimise risk while spreading across locally hosted secure cloud platforms. It also allows organisations to access commercially viable products that might not necessarily be financially viable in a single cloud provider offering, and higher availability of services due to spread infrastructure topology.
“When we spec a solution, we consult with the customer to understand what they need, for example, their business applications need a high performance and low latency environment, while for disaster recovery they want data centres in two hyperscalers and two different cities to minimise business risk. We then recommend preferred platform solutions and integrate and manage the environment for them,” D’sa says.
D’sa notes that many customers may also have a requirement to move between clouds. “This may be driven by performance, cost or technology changes. Customers’ business needs usually change. When you initially engage around a solution, a particular platform might suit their needs then and there, but these needs change over time. For example, a consumption-based model might appear to be the most cost-effective at first, but later prove to be too unpredictable. Migrations aren’t easy, but thanks to our presence in these clouds and the fact that we know our customers’ environments, we can take the pain out of their transition.”
Cloud choices
D’sa explains that the CipherWave Public Cloud, powered by Nutanix, offers IaaS, BaaS, DbaaS and RDaaS. “The CipherWave cloud offers a locally hosted and supported footprint. It’s a high-speed, enterprise-grade environment with high availability at a fixed cost.
“However, customers might also want a different cloud environment for redundancy, for certain cost benefits or because of a developer or supplier requirement outside of our platform. To address these needs, the CipherWave OneCloud also offers CipherWave-managed Microsoft Azure infrastructure and CipherWave-managed Huawei public cloud for storage and infrastructure services, with direct connections into the CipherWave public cloud.”
The expanded environment is proving so successful that CipherWave was recently named Huawei Cloud’s “Fastest Growth Partner of the Year 2023” only six months into the company's engagement with the hyperscaler.
CipherWave also has the ability to connect into AWS and is currently engaging with Alibaba cloud via BCX. D’sa says: “We are always looking at expanding our cloud footprint in line with what customers are looking for. We look at where the hyperscaler sits – typically it’s in Teraco, where we are – and then we evaluate factors such as network reach and what services they offer. Then we do a mapping based on our customer footprint and needs. We see ourselves as a cloud provider with an aggregated multicloud strategy.”
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