A level 1 BBBEE contributor with over 20 years' experience as one of South Africa's leading ICT services and solutions providers
COVID-19 has been a massively disruptive force—it has caused businesses to close, forced people to work from home, accelerated the rate of technological adoption and pressed organisations to reinvent themselves overnight to remain sustainable and survive.
According to Morgan Stanley, we are entering into a new era where data is driving transformation—and this isn’t data generated in the cloud or a data centre. Billions of IoT (Internet of Things) devices are becoming connected and producing a staggering amount of data at the edge.
We’re living in an age of ever-expanding data. As the IT landscape continues to evolve, businesses are becoming increasingly data-driven, and as organisations grow and adapt to change, they will typically need to store more information.
IDC predicts that the amount of data created over the next three years will surpass the data created over the past 30 years, and this trend is set to continue at an exponential rate. Data is a strategic business asset, and most business leaders realise the importance of having an agile, intelligent and resilient high-end storage infrastructure to protect and manage their data.
HPE GreenLake is a pay-per-use consumption-based model that delivers hardware, software, and expertise on-premises or in the cloud. Businesses pay for only what they use instead of investing in the infrastructure and skills to provide it themselves. HPE GreenLake enables businesses to combine the simplicity, flexibility and pay-per-use economics of the cloud with the security and control on-premises infrastructure offers.
Digital transformation and dynamic business models are fast becoming the key to success for many businesses. Data is an invaluable asset that underpins modern digital transformation strategies—data-driven insights can help organisations solve business challenges, make better decisions, and transform day-to-day operations, enabling them to grow their revenue and gain a competitive advantage.
COVID-19 has highlighted the urgency for digital transformation. It has forced organisations to rethink their business strategies to confront the future and remain sustainable and competitive. Technology has enabled many businesses to continue in ways that would not have been possible several years ago—and companies that were further along their digital transformation paths have been able to innovate and adapt more quickly.
The global COVID-19 pandemic forced people to change the way they work overnight. Remote working quickly became the norm across myriad industries as offices closed and organisations scrambled to adapt to maintain productivity.
Digital transformation has been a reality for organisations for many decades with the advent of enablers such as the internet, personal computers, commodity servers, artificial intelligence (AI), and mobile devices. The technology progression of these enablers over my 28-year career in IT has been both fascinating and awe-inspiring to observe—the possibilities for digital transformation with the ever-growing speeds, versatility and options seem almost limitless.
For years, Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) has been the next big thing in data centres. Promising to get rid of the inefficient, low performance, and extremely expensive legacy SAN infrastructure most companies employ, HCI leverages the CPU and memory resources within a cluster of servers to turn it into a collective storage pool that a business can access, replacing traditional infrastructure with an efficient, high performance, pay as you grow storage and virtualisation set-up.