With digital transformation becoming the driving force behind organisational strategies across the continent – Nigeria is no different. With the country recently emerging from its first recession – businesses have been forced to review IT strategies and spend – leading to an increased awareness for improved cloud adoption. With this wave has come the need for organisations to consider cloud computing as a way of storing and managing servers, databases, networking analytics and software through the internet (cloud). With this, experiencing faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale.
According to the IDC, worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure is forecast to reach $210 billion in 2019 – an increase of more than 23 percent over 2018. In Nigeria, a further 78 percent of companies increased their cloud computing budgets last year.
Akin Banuso, country manager at Microsoft says; “we created our Azure cloud offering recognising that organisations that migrate to the cloud would require an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help them meet business challenges. The solution also allows organisations the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive, global network using preferred tools and frameworks.”
For business transformation in the digital age – this allows organisations in Nigeria to pay only for cloud services used, helping to lower operating costs, run infrastructure more efficiently, and streamlining scaling as business needs change.
Speaking recently at an event orrganised by Microsoft in Lagos, to create awareness around its Azure offering and drive cloud migration, Wale Olokodana intelligent cloud (Azure) business group lead at Microsoft said, “for organisations in the country not wanting to move to the public cloud completely, leveraging a hybrid model may be better suited. This combines private and public cloud capabilities, allowing data and applications to be shared between them.”
Furthermore, when computing and processing demand fluctuates, hybrid cloud computing provides businesses with the ability to seamlessly scale their on-premises infrastructure up to the public cloud to handle any overflow—without giving third-party data centres access to the entirety of their data. Organisations are afforded the flexibility and computing power of the public cloud for basic and non-sensitive computing tasks, while keeping business-critical applications and data on-premises, safely behind a company firewall.
“And this is where a monumental factor comes into play – with Microsoft recently launching its first cloud data centres in South Africa. Going forward the latter will allow for faster, more agile business operations and provide access to next-generation technologies for the rest of the continent, including Nigeria”, Banuso said.
“Our aim with this event, is that CTO’s, CIO’s and the like will recognise not only the value that the public cloud has to potentially revolutionise their businesses – but also that it doesn’t stop there. Products like Azure stack as well as the just released Azure Stack HCI (Hyper Converged Infrastructure) solutions allow customers adopt models like the hybrid cloud to accelerate their digital transformation journeys – For businesses in Nigeria this will only help to keep them abreast in a dynamic and fasted paced environment”, Olokodana said.
Jumoke Akiyode-Lawanson
