Businesses increasingly understand the value that cloud services provide as they become more experienced in using cloud services and gain more insight into issues of security and policies, says Dimension Data cloud GM Grant Morgan.

The adoption of cloud for business purposes in South Africa lags use patterns in developed markets, but most companies have sufficient experience in using cloud services to derive good business value and agility from cloud services.

“Similar to virtualisation several years ago, companies explored the use of cloud services piecemeal. The first functions deployed into cloud were test and development environments, as these were highly variable and a good test case for cloud,” he says, adding that companies currently adopt cloud services to improve agility and enable faster development of applications, “especially with regard to applications development and innovations”.

Further, companies are realising that security risks of cloud, originally perceived as high, are low and in-house security and document management policies can be applied to data residing in the cloud.

Security concerns might prompt companies to request a dedicated fibre-optic connection to the service provider and a possible preference for local providers, but cloud services can provide the requisite security and performance required by a business simultaneously.

“Cloud services are ideally placed to provide a software-as-a-service (SaaS) and, increasingly, we are seeing SaaS being twinned with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). This enables companies to develop dynamic hybrid cloud environments, where they can move workloads into and out of the cloud, as required,” Morgan states.

Further, cloud services, specifically IaaS, have also been increasingly used to manage machine-created data, such as data generated by sensors in the mining industry. The data can also be analysed to provide predictive analyses on a host of different metrics, including equipment and infrastructure, such as plant processes, temperatures in the mine, geological events, gas levels and sensors measuring structural variations in a mine.

“Cloud will be the main enabler of the Internet of Things, especially as analytics can be performed in the cloud. It also enables significantly faster system innovation than is possible through in-house infrastructure renewal by companies and, consequently, faster deployment of applications and platforms to support business functions.”

Even for complex and highly regulated environments, such as the mining industry, cloud services allow for rapid development and full-scale prototyping tests so that the robustness of an application or platform can be verified, while successful developments can then be deployed into a live environment within hours of approval.

Further, cloud services provide significant business value with regard to disaster recovery.

“Cloud service, hosting and co-location initiatives are more competitive than on-premise systems and also dramatically reduce the complexity of managing corporate information technology environments.

Disaster recovery best practices typically require redundant infrastructure, which bloats the costs of maintaining and renewing such an environment. However, companies can use cloud services to reduce or even eliminate this requirement for redundant infrastructure, while ensuring business continuity,” Morgan explains.