HEITSA held its National Annual Technology Event (NATE) on 25-27 July at the UCT Graduate School of Business. Here, ICT veteran and technology specialist, Jaap Scholten, Head of Group ICT Strategy at Datacentrix and COO at eNetworks, a Datacentrix company, discussed whether educational institutions require yet another cloud.
Amazon Web Services launched its cloud services in 2006, followed by Microsoft’s Azure offering in 2010. Three years later, the word ‘hyperscaler’ entered our lexicon, referring to large cloud service providers that provide offerings such as computing and storage at enterprise scale, and #CloudFirst became the buzzword for everyone, including educational institutions.
Systems integrators were unsure how to measure the potential threat of cloud business, compared to traditional hardware and infrastructure sales. However, the groundswell of cloud adoption could not be ignored, despite raising many questions.
A serious shift in management think-tanks centred around ICT results versus business outcomes. Spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic, cost-saving efforts were applied at all levels of business, and ICT was put under the spotlight as an easy target.
The question being asked was how a cloud-first strategy would align to business outcomes: was this a pure-play in technological evolution, which would only benefit the new economy? And would the cost of modernising businesses into a #CloudFirst era outweigh the benefit?
After witnessing the mass-migration of numerous large customer workloads, the feedback was not quite what the technologists had hoped for.
Compliance officers raised concerns over data sovereignty, and dollar-based billing resulted in IT budgets experiencing unprecedented cost increases, without realising any associated operational benefit.
The cost of extracting data, as well as the compliance issues, rapidly led to a new approach. Given that almost all of an organisation’s records, including student marks for instance, now lived as data somewhere, it became paramount to place data at the centre of such a strategy.
And so, the #DataFirst concept was born.
A healthy #DataFirst approach supports the fundamentals of where data is hosted, how it is transported, and how it is secured. These underlying principles must be supported by a 360-degree approach, encompassing assessment, implementation, support, modernisation and continued gap analysis to assess the strategy’s execution progress. Ultimately, a #DataFirst strategy is aligned to business outcomes and outperforms a pure ICT strategy.
Systems integrators started building smaller private/public clouds, hosted in sustainable data centres where power is guaranteed, with easily accessible sub-millisecond onramp paths and high levels of physical and cybersecurity, while addressing Rand-based billing and locally-based data sovereignty. These clouds offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as well as Platform as a Service (PaaS) options, providing a home for many applications that are not hyperscaler native.
With multiple availability zones, users of these services address their disaster recovery needs and can start to realise large-scale, long-term savings compared to their pure hyperscaler or on-premises deployments. Systems integrators and cloud providers tend to concentrate top skills in these areas, thereby providing their customers with innovation, strategy, financial modelling and managed services all year long, while the customer can focus on their core business.
Multi-cloud adoption between different providers has proven to be both cost effective and risk averse, now that multi-cloud management tools are readily available – even ‘as a Service’ – simplifying cost management, reporting engines, and optimisation efforts.
As to the question “do we need another cloud?”, the answer is therefore a resounding “yes!” – and there will be many more to follow, almost moving into the boutique-genre of clouds designed for specific classes of workloads.
As HEITSA’s Premier Corporate Partner, along with partner Aruba, Datacentrix is strongly positioned to address the challenges of transitioning into a data-first institution. For more information, please contact Francois Jacobs on 083 602 5857, or via email on [email protected]