From Cloud To Hybrid-Cloud Services: How Enterprises Can Best Serve Their Customers

With a global shift to working from home, the reliance on the internet for access to work-related servers and data has been thrust into the spotlight.

With the internet as a backbone, many organisations and businesses – large and SMME – are looking beyond their traditional views of IT that included expectations of investing in hardware such as servers and back-up devices, towards more software centric environments.

We are undoubtedly entering an era where software and web-based applications are taking the lead, eliminating the costs associated with ownership and maintenance of hardware. Statista’s IT Market Model Survey expected revenues from the global software market to reach $456 billion by 2018 alone, and then to continue with an upward growth trend.

With this, the reliance on cloud computing – where cloud service hosts run a hardware skeleton of sorts – will similarly grow as organisations realise the benefits of investing in software development, while outsourcing the hardware requirements elsewhere.

And herein lies the beauty of the cloud: it creates flexibility where businesses can become more agile and responsive to changes in the environments in which they operate, particularly when they focus their resources in the development of business enhancing applications.

Apart from shifting the focus away from the ‘equipment’ such as servers and back-up devices, and rather focussing on the data and applications, the Capex onus on businesses becomes less.

With the internet serving as the conduit to valuable business data, employees can literally work from anywhere provided they have web connectivity. It’s a workplace revolution in keeping people productive when traditional office spaces are no longer where they meet to get a job done.

Importantly, the cloud-based workflows also enhance collaboration between remote and distributed employees, allowing people to engage and update documents with better document control – removing the chances that changes in one version get lost or overlooked in later ones.

From a business competitiveness point of view, enterprise-class technology becomes more accessible for large enterprises or fast-growing start-ups. For both, cloud services offer the ability to significantly disrupt the status quo.

As such hybrid cloud environments – where a mix of legacy on-premises data services are merged with third-party, public cloud services – are gathering momentum as enterprises seek to leverage the best from their existing infrastructure investments alongside the services of multiple cloud providers.

Join the Business Day Dialogues online discussion in partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise as industry thought leaders give practical insights on how hybrid cloud can enhance the agility and flexibility of an organisation to meet the needs of their customers, and how this will ensure business continuity by understanding what a multi-cloud strategy can mean for your business.

Guest speakers:

• Aki Anastasiou – presenter of TecHub & host of  WhatsNext
• Sarel Naude – solutions architect, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
• Tumediso Lobelo-territory manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
• Arthur Goldstuck– managing director, World Wide Worx

Date:  Thursday, November 19

Time: 9am

Register to watch online: https://bit.ly/2IARMPh