Ben Uzor Jr
In the face of increased economic pressures, Nigerian enterprises can no longer afford to put their Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) upfront to purchase Information Technology (IT) infrastructure such as servers, network switches, and storage platform for new projects. Consequently, IT executives are tasked with doing more with less to meet up with changing customer dynamics.
To this end, leading technology companies have advocated the adoption of innovative ways of reducing cost thus enabling businesses move from capital expenses to operational expenses whilst delivering efficient service. According to them, ‘Cloud Computing’ which describes a new supplement, consumption and delivery model for IT services based on the internet can enable such transition.
They made these revelations in Lagos last week at the 5th annual ‘NetApp Innovation’ Conference which focused primarily on Cloud Computing, Virtualisation, and Dynamic Data Centres. The conference which hosted more than 500 IT executives and decision makers also identified how business could leverage on the cloud model for improved Return on Investment (ROI) on IT infrastructure.
Martyn Molner, director, Middle East and Africa, NetApps who spoke to news men at the event revealed that businesses who refuse to embrace efficiency as part of its core strategy from an IT perspective would be looking at increased cost and poor utilisation. In his opinion, cloud computing would be beneficial to Nigerian businesses as it increases their ability to streamline resources as well as derive better ROI from IT assets. “For Nigerian businesses, if they want to be flexible, efficient and move into new markets and get the benefits swiftly, the cloud is paramount”, Molner added.
Corroborating the views of Molner, Rex Mafiana, country manager, Nigeria and Ghana, NetApp further stated that the cloud paradigm would change the way IT was delivered and would bring great value to the technology industry. “Cloud computing model gives IT departments’ elastic scalability, a pay-as-you-go model, predictable cost structure, data access any time, anywhere and better operational efficiency. Virtualization technology enables IT departments build a shared and service-oriented infrastructure that the cost is per usage and not constant cost.”
In the same vein, Tosin Amusa, technology sales manager, Cisco Nigeria pointed out that cloud computing delivers more flexibility in service delivery at higher scales with dramatic cost advantage. “If you look at your data centre you would discover that 77 percent of the IT budget goes into powering up the servers, switches and other infrastructures needed in your IT environment. You only spend 23 percent of your revenue delivering new capabilities”, he observed.
“If the business demand a new challenge and you are not able to meet it, the business becomes frustrated, you as an IT staff becomes frustrated as well. Then, the game has to change if you intend to keep up with the business needs in our unique environment especially in this part of the world. That is the concept of cloud computing”, Amusa posited.
In explaining how cloud computing converts CAPEX to operational expenditure (OPEX), Brendan Widlake, director, VMware observed that it apparently lowers barrier to entry, as infrastructure is typically provided by third-party and does not need to be purchased for one-time or infrequent intensive computing tasks. He also said that the software solution radically lowers management overhead and provides immediate access to broad range of applications.
Business Day gathered that the NetApps, Cisco, VMware had introduced an end-to-end Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture that provides enhanced security in cloud environments by isolating the IT resources and applications of different clients, business units or departments that share a common IT infrastructure. As part of their collaboration, the three companies would also offer a cooperative support model for this pretested and validated design architecture to help customers quickly build unified, virtualised infrastructure.
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