It’s fairly common knowledge that moving to the cloud has many advantages, such as allowing organisations to move faster, be more agile and facilitate innovation. But taking the right approach to your cloud migration is just as important.
Siatik’s Christian Hagner, notes that, “Yes, moving workloads to Google Cloud efficiently, easily and with minimal business impact is important, but ensuring that the workloads are deployed in a cost-effective manner is just as important. If you are considering moving your workloads to cloud-based services and solutions, it’s not only important to understand the basics of cloud computing and how it can help you accelerate your digital transformation, but its advantages and limitations as well. Making sure you have the right partner can be critical in this process.”
The Cloud Data Centre
South Africans have welcomed last month’s announcement of Google Cloud’s intent to open a region in the country, one of its first regions on the African continent. Many are enthusiastic about the idea of having their data housed locally. Not only does this present advantages from a security and reliability perspective, but faster speeds and lower latency are also expected to increase productivity for businesses across the continent.
Local organisations now have the capability to leverage ‘fully managed enterprise data warehouse solutions with gigabyte- to petabyte-scale storage and SQL queries.’ This will speed up business processes exponentially.
In the past, teams analysed data over days. With this level of capacity at their disposal, they will be able to analyse live data within minutes. The significance of this shift is immense and will help businesses make smarter decisions in real-time. Organisations will also be able to incorporate AI and machine learning use cases into their strategies. Due to these and a host of other exciting opportunities now available to the local market, innovation and operational efficiency are expected to skyrocket.
If they want to remain competitive, the question for most South African companies is no longer ‘should we migrate to the cloud?’ but rather, ‘what should we migrate to the cloud?’ Everyone accepts that the advantages far outweigh the limitations. The difficulty comes in knowing how to manage the transition.
Siatik: Cloud Migration Specialists
The transition can seem intimidating at first, but with the right support, it is well worth the effort. As Cloud migration specialists, Siatik have the technical skills and experience to shift your business from old server environments to the Cloud with ease and efficiency. Aiding organisations towards this digital transformation, while ensuring risk is minimised, is where Siatik excels.
Our goal is to work with organisations to maximise their revenue by improving and increasing productivity. “While the migration procedure can seem daunting for those not familiar with it, at Siatik we thrive in complex environments, and have been through this process in some of the world’s most complex environments, numerous times. What seems overwhelming and too technical for some, is a well-known path for us,” says CEO Ashton Fourie.
A Hybrid Approach
While it is widely accepted that migrating to the cloud offers improved levels of flexibility, reliability, performance, and efficiency, as well as lower IT costs, one should not be put-off by the magnitude of the task. Migrating to the cloud does not have to be an all-or-nothing operation. In fact, many businesses have found that a hybrid approach is working well for them. They can extend the capacity and capabilities of their existing infrastructure, while still functioning in the space that works best for them overall. Siatik will aid organisations in determining what that looks like individually – based on the amount of flexibility, control, and management required – and guide them through the full spectrum of the migration.
Eco-Conscious
In 2022, businesses need to prove their efforts toward utilising more sustainable and eco-friendly solutions in order to remain profitable, ethical, and competitive. Making the transition to cloud-based services is a huge step toward lowering the carbon footprint of an organisation. The cloud data centres have been a massive contributor to the success of Google Cloud’s status as the cleanest cloud in the industry. Migrating to the cloud can help organisations better comply with ESG standards..
Job Security
‘But what happens to back-office employees if we migrate to the cloud?’
Job security for back-office employees is not at risk. Siatik does not simply complete the migration and take leave, but rather work with teams to upskill them and equip them with the technical knowledge they will need. In-house training and skills development will take them straight into the future – transforming them into Google Cloud specialists. In many cases members of the current IT teams who are historically seen as an organisational overhead, become the data scientists that begin to deliver valuable insights–enabling them to become core value contributors to the business.
Africa: The Future and Beyond
A local cloud region will bring Google Cloud services closer to African customers, offering businesses the ability to move latency sensitive workloads like SAP HANA over to the cloud. The benefits of security, efficiency, scalability, flexibility, collaboration, and speed are equipping the local market for exponential growth.
The new data centre offers vast opportunity for local businesses to modernise applications and build exact cloud infrastructures tailored for individual operations.
Chat to the Siatik team to assist you in moving into the Cloud with simplicity and ease.
Siatik is renowned as one of the most Google focused technology partners in South Africa, a Google Premier partner, and certified Google Training partner. One of Siatik’s specialist skills is the migration of on-premises environments to the Google Cloud Platform, increasing business efficiencies across industry sectors. The business has done some of the biggest migrations in Africa, including the migration of one of the leading insurers in South Africa, and the migration of one of the biggest media houses on the continent
For more information:
Jaco van der Westhuizen
Sales & Business Development Executive
jaco@siatik.com
