Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 26 | Page 43

COUNTRY COUNTRY FOCUS: FOCUS: KENYA “ OUR INFRASTRUCTURE HAD COME TO ITS END OF LIFE, WHICH WAS A HUGE CHALLENGE FOR THE BUSINESS, BUT AT THE SAME TIME PROVIDED US WITH A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY. www.intelligentcio.com Because the organisation deals with sensitive financial data, its environment was made up of a host of ringfenced servers that would look after independent services. Downtime was not just a business challenge but was severely impeding customer service – a simple Internet disruption or unplanned reboot would stop all access to data. Power issues, a common place problem in Africa, would impede the air conditioners in the environment and using generators to keep the lights and power on was costly. After extensive investigations, the decision was reached that the cloud would be the most cost-effective solution for the business. The company shortlisted 10 cloud providers and finally decided that specialist cloud services company Node Africa would be the best fit for the company due to its infrastructure being built on the VMware platform. INTELLIGENTCIO 43