Global Micro, together with its long-term partner, Microsoft, today hosted a session with some of South Africa’s top enterprise clients.
The partnership plans to support these companies in transitioning to a hybrid cloud solution, while leveraging the benefits of a local service provider offering a local instance of Windows Azure services.
Enterprises often face problems with data sovereignty and network latency and these hurdles tend to hamper the transition to a hybrid cloud solution. Today’s session focused on how enterprises can make the transition to the cloud at their own pace, be guaranteed of zero downtime and experience complete licensing mobility by leveraging their existing agreements.
Demetri Petropoulos, head of business development, Global Micro, says: “Our dual datacentre environment has allowed us not only to provide the only instance of Windows Azure Services within our region, but has also given us the ability to offer a managed replicated virtual infrastructure for high availability and disaster recovery solutions. Global Micro is also the first business to provide HP 3Par as a service, which allows a customer with pressing storage needs to obtain onsite storage as an operational expense.”
Flowgear[i], a Global Micro solutions subsidiary, also the first integration platform as a service (PaaS) in Africa, addresses the growing need to integrate onsite applications with public and private cloud environments. “Through our high-touch business, we are able to provide in-depth skills to assist our clients in every technology facet required to deliver cloud solutions to an enterprise,” says Petropoulos.
Nick Keene, senior cloud sales manager, Microsoft, says: “Microsoft’s licensing mobility allows enterprise customers to consume locally hosted Infrastructure as a Service, extremely beneficial for enterprise customers as they typically have significant investments in IT infrastructure and facilities.
“Although the efficiencies of migrating to the cloud are generally justified, the risk and cost associated with migrating critical applications to the cloud can be significant, and if done without a clear strategy, it could complicate the IT environment rather than simplify it. Enterprises are thus more likely to have a hybrid private cloud approach, whereby they extend some of their workloads into a private cloud environment, still secure and isolated.”
The hybrid cloud transitioning strategies available in the industry today need to be equipped with capabilities that address complex solutions that cater to particular enterprise requirements. These requirements can range from providing connectivity to the datacentre, to synchronising the enterprise’s user identities across the cloud and providing backup solutions with enterprise-grade encryption and recovery assurance.
Global Micro provides a comprehensive stack of cloud solutions, which are designed to assist enterprise businesses with all the above-mentioned complexities of moving applications and workloads into a cloud environment.
