Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 19 | Page 65

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud Public cloud presents unique challenges, says Securicom ///////////////////////////// S outh African businesses are increasingly shifting applications, services and infrastructure to the cloud where they are more accessible and available. However, Securicom says companies are discovering that the public cloud presents some unique challenges. “South African businesses switching to the public cloud need to consider that their data could be located anywhere on the globe,” said Douw Gerber, from Securicom. “AWS typically lets you select a data centre location, but these are all located in Europe, Asia or USA at present. This introduces latency issues in applications that may be latency-sensitive for customers in sub-Sahara Africa in general. “What this means is that data transmission might be affected by spikes in use across the Internet. If application performance is a deal breaker for you, then the private cloud certainly trumps the public cloud.” Gerber says the public cloud is based on shared physical hardware which is owned Securicom says companies are discovering that the public cloud presents some unique challenges www.intelligentcio.com and operated by a third-party provider and the infrastructure is shared across numerous customers. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are examples of public clouds. Data centres are situated all over the world, with none in South Africa. “On the other hand, a private cloud is infrastructu