Johannesburg, 18 Mar 2022
South African IT leaders are confident about cloud’s ability to transform business and enhance operations. However, many still find that the complexity of managing the environment and its unpredictable costs slow further cloud adoption and optimisation.
This emerged during an executive round table hosted by IBM in collaboration with ITWeb, where CIOs of leading South African organisations discussed challenges in cloud optimisation.
IBM noted that while there were still certain concerns around moving all workloads to the cloud, virtually all organisations had started moving to the cloud, and most now used hybrid cloud models.
A study last year by the IBM Institute for Business Value in cooperation with Oxford Economics found that hybrid cloud is the dominant IT architecture, with only three percent of respondents using a single private or public cloud in 2021, down from 29 percent in 2019.
The IBM Institute for Business Value also reports that hybrid cloud generates 2.5 times greater business value than a single cloud platform approach. More significantly, it says that investment in cloud computing, when executed end-to-end in combination with other levers of business transformation, can generate up to 13 times greater benefits than cloud alone.
However, concerns around vendor lock-in, security, compliance and interoperability remain paramount. Round table participants said their digital transformation and cloud initiatives had underpinned their organisations’ successful transition to remote work during the lockdown. However, as the pandemic eased, many were finding that cloud initiatives were again taking a back seat in their organisations. Concerns were resurfacing around costs, complexity and data sovereignty, they said.
Said one: “Where IT ‘drove the bus’ during Covid-19, we are being moved to the back of the bus again. For the finance department, the elastic costs of the cloud are a problem: they want to know the exact costs and measurable business benefits of cloud.”
Ramzi Ben Ouaghrem, CTO & Technical executive at IBM (MEA), said emerging FinOps teams would increasingly take on the task of cloud-related financial management. “FinOps will serve as the gatekeepers of the cloud, ensuring that what is provisioned in the cloud is used correctly,” he said.
Ouaghrem highlighted IBM’s comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security and operations across hybrid environments. “IBM cloud solutions are built on Red Hat OpenShift, so organisations have choice and portability to develop and consume cloud services anywhere. IBM Cloud Paks with AI help organisations to build, modernise and manage applications securely across any cloud,” he said.
He said IBM’s approach to helping customers optimise cloud include modernisation and linking operating models with business transformation; a focus on using AI to gain insight from data and improve business processes, and implementing a solid security layer. He noted that by using a common platform for the hybrid cloud environment, organisations could address cost, governance and security concerns and achieve greater value from their data.
Sheldon Hand, Security Business Unit Leader at IBM Southern Africa, said: “Up to 70% of organisational data is ‘dark data’, which can be massively fragmented and unused. With a data fabric to connect, rather than collect, organisations can put in place a foundation for optimal data use and governance.”
Hand concluded: “We don’t need to motivate organisations to move to the cloud anymore – it’s already happening. But moving the first workloads was the easy part. The real challenge facing organisations now is moving core business applications, and managing new hybrid cloud environments. IBM is ready to help customers make the move successfully.”
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