Routed – AfricanCloud

[Column] Benjamin Coetzer: The cloud conversation has changed, it’s faster, smarter and better for business

At the start of the pandemic, anything that could facilitate remote work for scattered business teams, flourished overnight. Microsoft saw two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. Video calling company Zoom’s sales went up 370%. And communication platform Discord’s value more than doubled.

And cloud is no different. In 2020, 87% of global IT decision-makers concurred that the pandemic would accelerate the shift to cloud.

And it has, says Benjamin Coetzer, Director of Routed, a local VMware Cloud Verified and VMware Principal Partner. “This digital transformation was and still is a global phenomenon, South Africa included. We’re still seeing more spending on all kinds of IT avenues that revolve around facilitating remote work. People are moving into the cloud, getting rid of their on-premises data centres, getting remote VPN software and end-user device protection software – generally mobilising the workforce to work from anywhere.”

Different clouds, different companies

During the pandemic, many companies started doing more research on cloud migration and deepened their understanding of the cloud environment. “Before, the market had a superficial understanding of cloud – they’d only ever heard of cloud hyperscalers like Google and Azure and thought the cloud was only meant for developers. Now, businesses are learning about the different types of cloud, each with its own ideal use case. They’re doing more research because they were pressed to do so during the shift to remote work. They’re making smarter decisions when planning their shift to cloud,” says Coetzer.

Hyperscalers are more suited to development, while VMware cloud providers are ideal for business use cases. And moving to the right type of cloud not only means a better cloud environment, but also an easier migration, he explains. “Moving to a hyperscaler is a slow and error-prone process for a company running VMware or Hyper V on premises. But moving to VMware cloud is extremely easy. It truly becomes a lift and shift operation, taking their workloads that are running on-premises and migrating it to a cloud provider like Routed. There’s no re-platforming needed, there’s no retooling needed, there’s no retraining of IT staff or a change in IT or business processes. It’s basically like outsourcing the entire hosting function from a physical data centre to cloud.”

Previously, many people made the mistake of moving to hyperscalers when they didn’t need to. “Again, hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, Google or Alibaba Cloud are focused on development, so they use a different underlying platform. “There’s a lot of pain involved in migrating virtual workloads from a traditional hosting platform to a hyperscale provider. It’s like trying to modify a petrol engine to run on diesel.”

Cloud migration timeframes

When choosing the right type of cloud, migration timeframes can be drastically shortened, says Coetzer. Now that people understand the different cloud environments better, they’re making better decisions and fewer mistakes, leading to shorter migration timeframes. “One of our clients decided to let go of their physical offices and data centre in its entirety when all their employees started working from home. And they moved over to the cloud platform in a weekend. They were running Hyper V on-premises and simply shifted everything to us. It drastically reduced their spending in terms of rent, power, facilities, and more.”

For some companies, this was the main driver to move to cloud during the pandemic, he says. “Yes, cloud, is more agile, efficient, and secure, but for many it became a straight-forward budget decision. The alternative would have been to rent space for their servers at a colocation facility, but that becomes extremely costly as well. So, they skipped this step that many others are taking in their digital transformation journey – going from on-premises to colocation to cloud – and went straight to cloud, sparing time, effort, and money in the process.”

But that’s the exception to the rule, he says. For most companies moving to VMware cloud, this journey, from the first meeting to being moved in on router hosting, takes up to six months.

“Moving traditional workloads to a hyperscaler is a much lengthier process – and prone to lead to workload repatriation. A 2019 report done by 451 Research, which interviewed 12,500 companies, found that on average, 30% of workloads migrated had been repatriated within a year of moving. The main reasons for repatriating workloads included performance, cost, and data sovereignty.”

But one thing is sure – whatever cloud environment they choose, the pandemic has caused a ripple effect that’s seeing most people at least seriously considering a move to cloud. And lighter, more agile, and more efficient resource usage will be the long-term result.

Benjamin Coetzer is the Director of Routed.

[Column] Andrew Cruise: How to create a cloud migration strategy for your business

The benefits of cloud are clear: increased agility and efficiency, longer-term hardware efficacy, and greater security are just some of the perks.

Why, then, has everyone not yet moved their operations to cloud? “Eliminating traditional infrastructure is a major undertaking,” says Andrew Cruise, MD of VMware Cloud provider Routed. “And with all the cloud options available today, decision-making has become more complex.”

With all the noise out there, it’s important to put a solid cloud migration strategy in place. Here’s how to cut through the fog and get on the cloud:

1. Outline your environment

There are, in broad terms, two types of cloud environments: those for development, and those for enterprise. “Marketing has blended the two use cases and confused users,” says Cruise. “Devops is exciting, amazing, cutting-edge. The business usage, less so, because it involves migrating physical workloads to the cloud. Don’t confuse need-to-have with nice-to-have and spend money on something that seems very attractive, but that you won’t really need or use.”

2. Do an audit of your operations

Cloud doesn’t necessarily replace all previous options but is an add-on in the hybrid world of today. Do an audit of your company’s operations and decide what needs to be moved to the cloud, says Cruise. “Some operations might not be suited to cloud for compliance reasons, for example. The decision to move certain operations to cloud depends on your desired outcome. You need to factor in your company’s unique variables for each operation, like cost, complexity, and compliance.”

Then, decide what needs to move to which type of cloud. “Different apps and operations belong in different places,” explains Cruise. “It’s unlikely that every cloud provider is fit-for-purpose for every app, and you need to choose the right environment for the right app. Picking a single platform because you want to keep things simple can mean suffering performance or commercial problems down the line. It introduces complexity to your final solution, yes, but each set of workloads will be in an ideal place.”

3. Start small

This is particularly important for SMEs, says Cruise. “If you move too much to cloud too quickly, it can lead to failed migrations and operational paralysis. Break your operations down into bite-sized pieces and move them one at a time.”

What you decide to move first depends on your needs. “Some migrations, like email or backups, are relatively simple and low risk. This might make sense for some companies. “For others, moving to virtual machines is the smarter choice. VMware Cloud operators, like Routed, are running the same VMware that you’re running on-premises – the same enterprise-grade storage and servers. You get the immediate benefits of performance, reliability, scalability, and flexibility while only paying monthly usage.”

4. Find the right management tools

When it comes to managing all these separate clouds once you’ve migrated, you won’t be able to achieve everything you want to with one management product, says Cruise. “Rather look for specialist management tools. If cost management is your priority or challenge, look for tools that manage costs across a range of cloud platforms. If you want to visualise your usage across multiple clouds, look for a product that gives you that kind of UI. A single management platform that does all the above, and does it well, does not exist. Choose specialist interfaces that do the job properly.”

Andrew Cruise is the managing director at Routed.

[South Africa] Routed achieves Gold Status in Veeam Cloud & Service Provider Program

Africa’s cloud platform Routed has earned Gold status in the Veeam® Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) program. The company is now one of the select cloud providers to offer its customers Veeam-powered solutions to build reliable, enterprise-grade Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offerings.

Veeam Software, the leader in backup, recovery and data management solutions that deliver Modern Data Protection, provides its solutions through strong alliance partnerships and seamless technology integrations with leading cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Cloud and IBM Cloud. Veeam offers a complete solution that is simple, flexible, reliable and powerful to help businesses transform the way they manage data and applications, to helping to ensure availability across cloud, virtual, physical, SaaS and Kubernetes environments.

Working with Veeam, Routed can now offer its customers a cost-effective way to scale their backup requirements and data management systems. Routed’s Managing Director, Andrew Cruise, is thrilled to be inpartnership with one of the world’s leading technology vendors and to be elevated to Gold VSCP partner status. “Digitally conscious customers are demanding faster, more reliable and effective IT infrastructures, regardless of where they keep their data, and our relationship with Veeam underpins our ability to provide this,” he says.

The partnership also offers partner perks tailored to the business, including internal-use licenses, marketing programs, deal registration and access to the ProPartner portal, which offers sales tools and other partner-related information to help qualify and drive business.

“Routed has demonstrated proficient knowledge of Veeam products, and we are confident in its ability to deliver Veeam-powered solutions to enable their customers to achieve optimum Modern Data Protection. We’re looking forward to collaborating with Routed to become even more profitable and drive growth.” Matthew Lee, Africa’s Regional Director for Veeam, says.

www.veeam.com

www.routed.co.za

[Column] Andrew Cruise: Why the cloud numbers don’t add up

In a recent survey by large-scale tech learning platform O’Reilly, 90% of respondents said their organisations are using cloud, and 30% said they’re fully cloud native. This makes it clear why ‘cloud’ is the buzzword on every IT leader’s lips. Seemingly, if you’re not getting on the cloud, you’re getting left behind.

But other insights reveal that the numbers just don’t add up. Cloud spend still accounts for just 6% of total IT spend, according to tech analyst IDC. And, while global cloud spend surged in the first quarter of 2021, the numbers dipped by 1.9% in Q2 – the first decline after seven quarters of spending growth since 2019.

The reasons

IDC proposes the dip in spending is due to the need for new infrastructure as a result of the pandemic. That may be the case, but it doesn’t explain why total cloud spend remains a small sliver of total IT spend – despite indicators of rapid growth and large-scale adoption, says Andrew Cruise, CEO of Routed.

“It could also be that cloud is, quite simply, cool. For years, decision makers have been told to go big on cloud or risk losing out to competitors. And while this is certainly true, the money doesn’t lie. What organisations are saying and what organisations are doing are quite different. And, until they do make the move, some might be bluffing for fear of sounding like they’re behind.” It might also be that IT leaders, for now, are facing challenges in their move to cloud, he adds.

“They want to make the move, they plan on making the move, but they’re not quite getting there yet. Eliminating traditional infrastructure is a major undertaking and it’s unlikely that every cloud provider is fit-for-purpose for every app. Migrating everything to cloud is a daunting task and, while companies are clearly migrating certain services or apps onto cloud, they’re still running their own datacentres.”

Getting there

Multicloud environments have grown increasingly complex, with no comprehensive visibility. Organisations are running different services on the cloud provider that best meets their needs for the given application – with no overarching system to link all these siloes. “That is until you consider the virtual machine, like VMware, which is able to optimise applications independent of the cloud environment. And all the benefits of cloud are not just hype – it truly does increase agility, efficiency, longer-term hardware efficacy and even greater security,” adds Cruise. And decisionmakers are clearly aware of this – albeit that the predicted shift is happening slower than expected. All signs point to ever more adoption. IDC predicts that compute and storage spending for cloud infrastructure will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 12.4% for 2020-2025 before reaching $118.8bn in 2025.

“Although the move to cloud has been slower than experts predicted, I believe that the multicloud story will be slightly more common than niche. There’s still a long road ahead, but the truth is that it’s not too late to start considering the cloud journey and benefit from the great savings and efficiency that virtual hosted environments offer. Using the right tech, and partnering with the right provider, can create the most efficient systems your organisation has seen to date.”

Andrew Cruise is the managing director at Routed.

Orchestrating multicloud: Implementing a strategy that works

VMWare Principal Partner and Africa’s only neutral cloud infrastructure business, Routed, says implementing a workable multicloud strategy hinges on a business properly assessing applications within its current infrastructure environment to decide which cloud is ideal for each of its applications.

“This should be balanced against the ability to provide fault tolerance for each application across cloud operators, as well as the integration between applications which might affect decisions to deploy applications together on the same cloud platform, or across multiple cloud platforms,” says Andrew Cruise, Managing Director, Routed.

Another equally important consideration is ensuring internal resilience when migrating or developing applications on any cloud platform. “It’s much better to first mitigate risk and avoid downtime caused by relatively minor issues, and only then design fault tolerance or failover between cloud operators in the event of a major downtime incident on one of your cloud operators,” he says.

An organisation’s choice of providers should be dictated by their ability to deliver a secure, performant and highly available hosting experience, combined with the required features and functions for all business applications. “Your provider’s credibility and reliability track record should be investigated and their expertise to run your business-critical applications queried,” notes Cruise.

He adds that a multicloud approach does not have to include all cloud operators or indeed any of the hyperscale cloud operators. “Risk mitigation dictates that multiple cloud operators should be chosen, but it should also be feasible for these to use one consistent platform, which is what VMware Cloud has been designed to do.”

The benefits of multicloud typically fall into two groups; the first being the value features of each individual cloud and the second group centred on risk mitigation, it’s important to remember that these two groups are inherently in conflict. “By definition, unique platforms, software and functions offered by a specific cloud provider are not offered by the others and therefore it is nearly impossible to load balance or provide cross-cloud resilience for applications that are developed with these toolsets across multiple cloud platforms,” explains Cruise.

Achieving resilience requires a lowest common denominator approach, which means using tools, functions and software available across all the cloud platforms in use. “Notably, the exception to this conflict is the VMware Cloud ecosystem: whether hosted in AWS, Azure, GCP, or any of the global hyperscale clouds, or on a local VMware cloud operator, or on VMware Cloud Foundation on dedicated internally managed infrastructure, a common toolset and software stack facilitates a consistent experience for hosted applications,” he says.

While multicloud and its place in digital transformation continues to evolve, Cruise cautions that it may not be suitable for every organisation, and those that do embark on the journey should expect proper implementation to take time.

“Cloud hype has progressed from the urgent ‘move to cloud!’ call of a decade ago, to ‘hybrid cloud rules’ five years ago, to the ‘multicloud or bust!’ message of today. Of course, each of these blanket statements has merit but there is no magic silver bullet for a businesses’ infrastructure requirements. Although the predicted move to cloud has been slower than the experts predicted, I believe that the multicloud story will be slightly more common than niche,” says Cruise.

www.routed.co.za

[South Africa] Cloud provider Routed launches new portal to provide curated resources for its partners

South Africa’s cloud provider Routed, has launched its channel partner portal to provide curated resources for partners, managed services providers, and ISPs selling, marketing, and operating as resellers of VMware Cloud through Routed.

Routed became the first VMware Cloud Verified partner in Africa in 2019 and has gone on to become a VMware Principal Partner, too. Andrew Cruise, managing director for Routed, says that Routed has built a resilient and robust channel to assist its partners in delivering the best solutions that their end-customers have come to expect from VMware.

“VMware has a discerning customer base with specific requirements of their cloud technologies. Building our Partner Platform has allowed us to curate and focus our efforts on providing our partners with the right tools, material, and support for VMware Cloud presence in Africa through Routed,” says Cruise.

Sumeeth Singh, Cloud Provider Business Head at VMware South Africa, added that “Cloud computing solutions are driving the current wave of digital innovation. Through partners like Routed and their channel, we see the acceleration we look forward to, in an age where organisations big and small can benefit from a secure, efficient, and scalable VMware Cloud service delivery platform.”

According to Gartner, spending on the public cloud is forecast to grow over 18% in 2021, with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) expected to gain the most. Managed Service Providers, ISPs, even ISVs and distribution partners will do well to capitalise on this as organisations’ needs evolve. The market has already shifted from supply-driven to demand-driven, and it’s become essential for all organisations to consider how the cloud fits into their infrastructure plans.

On-premises infrastructure will always have its place in organisations, especially when more control is required, but it is asset-heavy and slow to adapt to change and growth. For the right use-cases migrating infrastructure to the cloud provides end-customers with agility and cost savings.

Routed depends on partners who can manage the implementation of its solutions, some of the most complete VMware Cloud-based infrastructure deployments available locally. “The opportunity exists for our partners who, with the right resources, knowledge and support from Routed and VMware, can confidently engage with their end-customers to provide the world-class solutions that VMware is renowned for with the level of support and service that they come to expect,” adds Cruise.

Over the past five years, Routed has established itself as the leading provider of VMware Cloud on the continent. Its success has followed from its relentless focus on providing an integrated cloud platform that addresses enterprise cloud, recovery, and modern application development requirements, which are taken to market through trusted partners.

“The Routed Partner Portal is the start of an exciting journey for cloud and specifically VMware Cloud in South Africa. End-user enterprises deserve a reliable, highly available and secure cloud infrastructure. Now the channel has the resources to grow their skills and access some of the best support materials available to develop this customer base.” Cruise says.

With its Principal Partner status as a Cloud Provider – the highest tiered recognition within the VMware Partner Connect programme – Routed’s partners now benefit from the same level of resources and support that a Principal Partner will enjoy but facilitated by Routed.

“We are changing the cloud landscape, and this is just the start because, at Routed, we want the industry to develop because when the end-customers realise the benefits, we all win,” adds Cruise.

New partner applications to the Routed Partner Portal will commence in 2022 by engaging with the Routed team.

www.routed.co.za

[Column] Andrew Cruise: Moving to the cloud – is it right for your business?

If the pandemic taught us one thing, it’s that remote work is a viable alternative to large, expensive offices and IT infrastructure and hardware.

“Many South African businesses have slashed their office space after realising that they could save money while still being fully operational remotely,” says Andrew Cruise, Managing Director of vendor-neutral cloud infrastructure provider, Routed.

And though only around 5% of the South African enterprise market is fully on the cloud, according to Cruise, many more are now considering this option. “Work from home mandated as a result of the pandemic proved to many organisations that the need for physical hardware and infrastructure is fading as fast as the idea that everyone has to work from an office,” says Cruise.

Here’s what you need to know to make the right decision for your business.

The benefits

Globally there has been a return to office environments whether full time or in a hybrid-approach, but for most in South Africa many employees remain working from home at least for the foreseeable future, says Cruise. “Companies are realising that there’s no need to have on-premises hardware anymore, because cloud provides a much more flexible solution. Even companies that have successfully moved back to the office are seeing a need for cloud services in order to have remote access when needed.”

Furthermore, the cloud is more cost-effective in the long run – with less risk.

“Moving to the cloud means you’re effectively renting hardware, which removes the hidden costs of mitigating against failures, disaster recovery and maintenance when you run your own hardware. Though it may seem expensive to move initially, it can save companies a bundle in on-premise hardware as well as remove the risk of broken or stolen hardware – which could, of course, result in considerable operational losses on top of the physical loss. The good cloud providers are constantly refreshing their equipment, meaning you benefit from constantly improving performance, and won’t have hardware upgrade costs every five years.”

The hurdles

That being said, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to move everything to the cloud. “There’s still some reasons to keep certain things on-premises, including for compliance purposes. But ultimately, the cloud offers a lower total cost of ownership,” says Cruise.

Secondly, good internet is an essential when it comes to cloud. “Fast, reliable, affordable internet is a necessity for enterprise cloud to prosper.”

Timing is also important, he adds. “We’re expecting a significant shift to cloud over the next five years as companies reach the end of their hardware cycles. It doesn’t make sense to move to cloud if you’ve just upgraded all your hardware and have everything under warranty. But, when the next replacement cycle rolls around, that’s the perfect time to make a move.”

Choosing the right provider

There are several new entrants joining the colocation stalwarts like Teraco in the local market, including Vantage’s new data centre; as well as Oracle building a cloud presence in SA, IBM’s SAP-based cloud offering, and Huawei recruiting new resellers, which is all good news for the growing cloud market, says Cruise.

But moving to cloud should not be done on a whim, he warns. “Do proper analysis of the contract and of the provider, and, critically, whether they’re right for your business needs. Be careful of services at heavily discounted rates – could they be based on ageing out-of-warranty hardware? Many organisations have been lured into discounted contracts, only to find out two years later that they’re locked in and suddenly having to pay large fees and remain contractually bound for a few more years.”

Routed has recently taken a vendor-like approach to its own business, enabling it to provide partners with the best cloud solutions for their customers. Cruise explains: “We are engaged with distributors here in SA that are already distributing Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to reseller partners, who are selling that on to the end-users, and we’ve led the market by recently launching the VMware Cloud equivalent here. We use ISP, MSP, IT support companies and developers as our partners because they’re experts in the provision of specialist services and managing their client relationships, while we focus on presenting our VMware Cloud service interface and make sure that it’s available. And that’s really what people want from the cloud.”

Whether its working from home, the office or anywhere in-between, organisations and their staff are demanding solutions that are flexible and scalable as the world adapts. “Cloud is that solution, but it will come down to the partner that supports the transition that will make or break the decision forever, so organisations need to take care, and choose wisely,” concludes Cruise.

Andrew Cruise is the managing director at Routed.

[Column] Andrew Cruise: Hybrid cloud and multicloud – is there a difference and does it matter?

Vendor neutral cloud infrastructure provider, Routed, says that the archetypal hybrid or multicloud concept has become needlessly complicated. Managing Director, Andrew Cruise, explains: “Ultimately no-one ever takes a pure route and even pure public cloud does not exist. So, let’s just call it cloud and understand that it covers a variety of scenarios.”

Cruise adds that while hybrid cloud is defined as a combination of public cloud and private cloud, and multicloud an extension of hybrid cloud into multiple public clouds, no enterprise deploys their infrastructure in such a linear or elegant fashion: corners are cut, and easy options are taken.

One clear trend emerging in the current environment is the difficulty of clear collaboration among cloud providers. “Providers of cloud platforms prefer to offer unique services specific to their platform where the end user experience is typically very different across said platforms. Where collaboration is possible it’s through open APIs, but this lowest common denominator outcome means only the most basic and standard functions and services are easy to port between platforms,” says Cruise.

In contrast, the VMWare Cloud approach combines the benefits of hyperscalers, plus local VMware Cloud verified operators, plus private cloud foundation deployments to give the enterprise a consistent experience. “As much as developers try to standardise on one set of tools e.g. Kubernetes, each of the global powerhouses will attempt to offer extensions or integrations of their own to make their offering more attractive and ultimately more sticky,” says Cruise.

He adds that there is a definite need and place for more niche cloud platforms outside of the major hyperscalers because there will never be a one-size-fits-all solution from any global mega cloud provider. “Local operators will always be able to offer specific solutions to local requirements. Local cloud operators can often offer a more tailored experience to smaller and medium sized enterprises than is possible when dealing with a faceless global public cloud corporation.”

Rather than erroneously imagining that multicloud is achieved simply by using Office365 and running your website on AWS, Cruise says it should be seen as connecting privately between owned infrastructure (which might be on VMware), hyperscalers like AWS / Azure / GCP and/or other local cloud operators. “Initially the strategy may be to share data, but the goal is to facilitate the seamless migration of applications, either VM or container based, to the platform which is most suitable for the application at the time.”

Andrew Cruise is the managing director at Routed.

[South Africa] Building a successful multicloud strategy unlocks IT business value, Routed

South Africa’s cloud market is showing good signs of growth and development as enterprise customers begin to take serious notice of multicloud and its benefits. As a result, it is imperative to develop and maintain a robust mutlicloud strategy that meets continuously evolving business demands.

Andrew Cruise, managing director, Routed, a neutral cloud infrastructure provider, notes there are clear business benefits of pursuing a multicloud approach, including having a choice of best-in-class platforms to match a variety of business requirements and the ability to efficiently allocate scarce capital by utilising the operating cost model of cloud consumption. “However, some other no less important advantages of mutlicloud involve its potential to drive innovation, flexibility, and scalability of new apps in hyperscale public clouds. Multicloud can also ameliorate risks of failure and vendor lock-in by load balancing across multiple cloud platforms. In addition, multicloud really enables IT to meet business needs by freeing up time to focus on where value is added.”

Considering the sheer number of options available, the task of building a successful strategy should inevitably begin with a clear decision on where an enterprise’s efforts and resources should be focused. “In other words, where does IT bring business value? Use cloud infrastructure to free up internal resources and scarce capital to facilitate investment in these areas,” he adds.

Cruise says it is also advisable to build out from familiar areas of expertise incrementally. “A ‘big bang’ re-platforming approach, especially involving multiple unfamiliar hyperscale environments, is fraught with risk. Instead, base digital transformation strategy on current expertise, use industry-standard virtualisation platforms like VMware both on-premise and in local clouds for core business critical foundational workloads, and then add cloud native apps in global hyperscalers in stages.”

Successfully managing a multicloud environment is another understandable area of concern for enterprises, especially where security and regularity compliance are non-negotiable. “A proper assessment of people, processes and control can provide a bird’s eye view of all IT and from there what is required to apply policies and procedures coherently together with a security strategy across all platforms,” says Cruise.

As digital transformation and cloud migration are now fully understood as business imperatives, choosing the right provider should be a carefully considered decision. Cruise explains that it’s vital to understand that no two cloud providers are the same, and that each market and sell on what they do differently. “Each provider has their own unique set of services and tools, which paradoxically, is where their value lies, but the drawback is that it also creates a barrier to multi-cloud due to incompatibilities. Enterprises should be circumspect in targeting these specific USPs in each provider as they will enforce a level of vendor lock-in and base their multicloud strategy on which providers will give them a consistent user experience across all platforms.”

As enterprise demands shift, how cloud is deployed will adapt in tandem. Cruise believes the future is likely to be a pragmatic cloud or dirty cloud. “This is the path of least resistance as it leads to what works most easily. This is mixture of onsite; private-style cloud like local VMware VPC; and public cloud from global hyperscalers.”

www.routed.co.za

[South Africa] ACS transforms Disaster Recovery with VMware and Routed

ACS, a division of Altron that provides secure data hosting and networking for not only the Altron Group of companies but also external customers across South Africa, has announced the strengthening of its partnership with VMware Cloud Provider partner Routed. The partnership’s aim is to enhance ACS’s current disaster recovery (DR) offering with a more scalable and efficient cloud-based solution.

“We provide the secure hosting of transactional data as well as applications which contain a significant amount of private and critical information. Given the sensitivity of this data, it must always be available. Our previous solution required significant granular manual intervention when we needed to switch customers over to DR. It was therefore essential to implement a more cost-effective solution that could cope with the massive amount of data that needed to be transported across to the DR data centre,” says Mira Andric, ACS Operations and Delivery Manager.

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Andrew Cruise, MD of Routed Hosting who is the first VMware Cloud Verified Partner (VCPP) in Africa, says the previous ACS DR solution was not only difficult to manage, but it was manual-driven for recovery and tied to their storage resulting in an inflexible environment.

“Because ACS runs VMware inside their data centre and they themselves are a VCPP, it made sense to deliver a solution that combines our respective expertise in the VMware ecosystem. They are quite forward-thinking to approach another service provider partner to deliver a best-of-breed offering rather than try do everything themselves,” he says.

“We were looking for a VCPP partner that could integrate well with what we already had in place. It was not a case of reinventing the wheel but rather implement something that could take the business to the next level.” Andric adds.

ACS implemented VCloud availability and shipped over 30TB of data within two weeks. The entire project took three months to complete with ACS now running a full DR-as-a-service (DRaaS) offering incorporating the reliability, availability, and security needed.

“ACS is providing customers with a self-service portal where they can ensure that the DR systems are available and up and running at a moment’s notice. Our engagement with Routed has been a partnership, and they have been actively involved in setting the systems up with us and our IT teams,” she says.

According to Andric, this has enabled ACS to complete the project on time and within budget.

“The cost savings have already started coming through. What is most important for us is that Routed has demonstrated that the VCloud offering is running the way it should at a price that is affordable to our customers. Furthermore, the IT teams within our customer environment understand the solution and it is incredibly user-friendly,” says Andric.

Running DRaaS is traditionally quite complex as those are the systems that companies do not require daily.

“However, Routed guided us on this complex path and empowered us to deliver a self-service platform to our customers. Now, within five clicks, the DR system is up and running. The VMware system is just a pleasure to run when you need it most. It has provided us and our customers with a good night’s sleep because they know that when they need it, DR will be done as effectively and securely as possible,” she says.

According to Cruise, ACS can deliver this solution to not only Altron Group companies but also external customers.

“ACS can provide a suite of services that speak to the security and compliance requirements of the digital age. And all this is delivered with the availability and reliability of a VMware cloud solution,” he concludes.

www.acs.altech.co.za