A full 93.7% of global businesses see cloud as critical to meeting immediate business needs amid the pandemic uncertainty.
Before COVID-19, many companies had embarked on digital transformation journeys, but the pandemic revealed that many were not as agile as they had previously thought. The pandemic laid bare deficiencies in businesses’ cloud infrastructure, security and network architecture capabilities, hindering their ability to adapt and remain agile.
This was one of the findings of Dimension Data’s 2021 Hybrid Cloud Report, which highlights the critical need for business agility, and the role hybrid cloud has had on helping businesses achieve this.
According to the report, the pandemic has forced a cultural mindset shift with global organisations adapting their agility plans from recovering infrastructure and applications to getting office-based workers set up and working from home, and has provided a significant opportunity to accelerate digital transformation initiatives.
The report, which surveyed 950 decision-makers in 13 countries across five regions, identified the increasing reliance on technology and found that in SA cloud remains business critical, with 88% viewing cloud as vital to meeting immediate business needs amid the uncertainty caused by the pandemic.
In addition, 84.3% agree that pandemic has forced their business to rely on technology more than ever before. It also showed that the benefits of hybrid cloud are already clear, with 53% of SA respondents saying they are already using, or piloting hybrid cloud (lagging behind the 60.9% global average). Finally, the research revealed that hybrid cloud is the future, with 42.2% planning to implement a hybrid cloud solution within the next year or two.
“Hybrid cloud is now seen as critical to data-driven processes and real-time decisions both now and in the future, and by implementing hybrid cloud solutions at the above-mentioned rate South Africa will surpass the global average in two years,” the company said.
Changing attitudes
Over and above boosting cost efficiencies, organisations need to relook security and compliance and the complexities of implementing hybrid cloud. The report showed that 38.6% of respondents in SA claim that the difficulty of managing data security is one of the greatest barriers to adopting hybrid cloud.
The report found that network performance and a shortage of skills were also regarded as major barriers to hybrid cloud adoption. Both, if not appropriately addressed when implementing the cloud, could undo the benefits it offers.
Kyle Stanton, executive: Intelligent Infrastructure at Dimension Data, says: "The key drivers for hybrid cloud adoption are agility, business continuity and compliance, and the ability for organisations to respond to change effectively. A sustainable cloud strategy must be closely aligned to the overall digital transformation strategy and supported by scalable infrastructure and cloud optimised platforms to truly experience and reap the business rewards.”
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