Jonathan Clarke, EMC Southern Africa

Cloud computing is transforming IT by delivering measurable benefits which positively impact the business. As a result, CIOs are able to focus on strategic issues and outsource some operational aspects of technology to a cloud service provider.

Jonathan Clarke, alliances manager of EMC Southern Africa, says these benefits include greater efficiency, more flexibility, anytimeanywhere accessibility, reliability, high availability, enhanced security, higher levels of automation, wider optimisation and improved business agility at lower cost.

As current IT infrastructures are expensive and bound by rigidity and complexity, enterprises are being driven by the need to be more agile. Cloud computing represents a way to address these issues while simultaneously transforming the way problems are resolved.

EMC is a global leader in enabling business and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service, and cloud computing is fundamental to this transformation. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyse their most valuable asset – information – in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way.

“The volume of information continues to grow at an astonishing rate. This growth – and big data – are transforming all aspects of business and society. Cloud computing solutions provide organisations with new levels of economies of scale, agility and flexibility compared with traditional IT environments. In the long term, this will be a key tool for dealing with the complexity of the digital universe,” Clarke says. Greg Hatfield, Dimension Data’s general manager: cloud services for Middle East and Africa, agrees. “Cloud computing is transforming IT by turning CIOs into intermediaries between business requirements and service providers,” he says. “By outsourcing the more mundane tasks to the cloud where they are handled by a service provider, IT can be elevated up the value chain.”

Earlier this year, Dimension Data was awarded number one EMC Partner status in South Africa. The two organisations have a long-standing relationship, and Dimension Data is part of a group of integrators which participates in the EMC Velocity Signature Solutions Centre Partnership Programme.

According to Hatfield, cloud computing is being driven by the business imperatives of cost optimisation, risk optimisation and strategic agility.

“Enterprises can no longer afford to pay for surplus technology that is only needed occasionally,” he says. “With cloud computing, enterprises have the option to only pay for what they consume – a far more efficient IT business model which offers true economies of scale. In effect, cloud computing is transforming business in general by making money available for strategically differentiating projects which make the enterprise more competitive.”