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.
COVID-19 has created massive uncertainty and amplified the need for businesses to advance their digital transformation efforts and innovate to survive. According to Deloitte, many organisations began innovating rapidly immediately after the World Health Organisation declared the global pandemic in 2020.
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.
There will always be market and technology disruptions impacting businesses across all sectors. An organisation’s ability to rapidly shift its business model through digital transformation to adapt to change can mean the difference between success and failure.
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.
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.
Customer support is perhaps the most important factor for any organisation that relies on third-party software to run its day-to-day operations. And while open source software has many virtues, its unrivalled level of support is where it really shines – supported by a community of thousands of amateurs, professionals and hobbyists.
Whether they improve your employees’ ability to do their job, extend your reach, enable new business services or enhance customer experience, apps offer an efficient, cost-effective method for driving business outcomes, or at least they should.
With several South African companies affected, including top-tier organisations such as Telkom, the recent global panic around the WannaCry ransomware attack has opened many South Africans’ eyes to the very real risks of global cybercrime on businesses anywhere, anytime, and of any size.