Sage has appointed cloud specialist 4Sight Holdings as official strategic hosting provider under their Sage Partner Cloud programme, both for South Africa and MEA to assist customers across Africa with their migration to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
4Sight received the accreditation after meeting stringent requirements related to its hosting capabilities and ability to provision infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to help business partners and Sage customers accelerate cloud adoption and meet their strategic technology transformation objectives.
“As a well-established provider with a successful track record in delivering Sage solutions to customers across multiple sectors, 4Sight is proud to pioneer this delivery model in Africa,” says Denzil Moorcroft, Sales Director Channel Partners at 4Sight.
4Sight is able to migrate traditional on-premises Sage applications to the cloud, including Sage X3, Sage 200 Evolution, Sage 300 People and Sage 300 Cloud. The cloud-based service also caters to all third-party ISV products and add-ons.
“The Sage accreditation creates significant opportunities to provide hosted and managed services to partners and customers, which empowers them to unlock the myriad of benefits offered from the cloud computing delivery model,” states Moorcroft.
He continues: “Delivering these on-demand services requires a secure, reliable infrastructure platform, which we provide as an Advanced Specialized Microsoft Azure partner.”
Once in the cloud environment, companies benefit from low-cost and reliable, centralised and secure anytime, anywhere access to these ERP applications, with the ability to scale on-demand.
“Migrating to the cloud provides benefits of cost efficiency and security. It negates the hassle associated with managing on-site Sage server hardware, backups, disaster recovery and, most importantly, system security updates and upgrades,” says Aldo Van Tonder, Chief Digital Officer at 4Sight.
The Microsoft Azure cloud environment is the most widely used cloud service provider in the world with the largest global presence, which also creates unparalleled data sovereignty options. And the well-architected environment ensures safe data transfer in and out of the environment, and is more secure than on-premises server environments.
“When coupled with 4Sight's ISO/IEC 27001:2013 SANS accreditation, business partners and their customers can rest assured that they will receive the highest standards in security and data protection from us,” states Van Tonder.
Customers also benefit from a Microsoft-backed service level agreement that guarantees 99.9% uptime.
“There is no upfront capital expenditure required as customers consume the service on demand. They can also scale on-demand without the costs associated with managing more on-site capacity,” adds Van Tonder.
He continues: “Marrying an ERP solution like Sage with Microsoft and Microsoft Azure also creates opportunities for customers to boost operational efficiency and future-proof their business.”
For instance, once in the 4Sight cloud environment, business partners and customers receive 4Sight's proactive and reactive management monitoring service. Known as active management, the service leverages AI to predict potential issues and risks, and provides insights to identify opportunities to improve the customer's environment.
“Our team of industry professionals proactively vet these insights to unlock additional operational optimisation and cost management efficiencies,” explains Van Tonder.
4Sight will also continually monitor and assess potential security risks identified in the market while providing automatic patching and security updates seamlessly in the background, to ensure customers are always on the latest versions.
“And once customers migrate to the cloud environment, together with their business partners we can offer them access to add-ons like process automation (BPM) or easily integrate advanced capabilities such as AI, AP suites, procurement solutions, interfaces or our Power platform.”
4Sight additionally offers multiple reporting packs that provide more granular information about a customer's environment.
“Ultimately, the transition to the cloud does more than simply transform your business systems – it fundamentally changes how companies and staff engage with and use technology to enhance business efficiency, output and customer experience,” continues Moorcroft.
“Accessing these capabilities will ensure that business partners and customers can focus on their core functions while a trusted service provider like 4Sight takes care of the technology that enables their businesses. More importantly, the potential to unlock additional capabilities in future will change their business for the better,” he concludes.
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