EDITOR’S QUESTION
RICK VANOVER, DIRECTOR
OF TECHNICAL PRODUCT
MARKETING AND EVANGELISM
AT VEEAM SOFTWARE
with a vast influx of data that
an on-premise setup may not
handle. But examples like this
– of deploying a hybrid cloud
model to leverage the respective
merits of public and private
infrastructures to transform the
business – is still too rare.
D
igital transformation is now
requisite for survival for all
enterprises in the Middle East,
across all industries. The exponential
growth that we are going to see in data
from connected devices and increased
mobility will contribute to a greater
strain on legacy IT systems. But this
transformation is not straightforward,
and requires healthy investment, with
a clear strategy on data availability to
underpin it.
Many businesses and processes
simply cannot operate in a ‘manual
mode’ today, this is the central theme
of any headline outage – a clear
digital dependency.
The modern enterprise needs to
be anchored with key technologies
provided by virtualisation, modern
storage systems and cloud technologies
in order to be fully transformative.
Having 24.7.365 access to data, services
and applications must be the narrative
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thread that continually drives the digital
transformation story.
This is where the sophisticated
deployment of cloud technologies fits
into transforming the enterprise from
legacy to future-proofed. It’s not simply
about adopting cloud as a whole, but
investing in the right areas. Not enough
enterprises are yet leveraging the lower
cost and flexibility benefits of the public
cloud, and there’s still an assumption
that data must be kept on-premise due
to perceived security issues.
Enterprises must go beyond simple
application testing in the public
cloud environment. It’s about using
hybrid cloud in a way that benefits
the individual organisation, and its
workloads. For example, a university
may choose to move some of its
workloads to the public cloud – to
benefit from its scale and responsiveness
– at particularly busy times during
the year, as it knows it will be dealing
The biggest challenge to
adopting new technologies on
the road to digital transformation
can be a combination of people,
processes and problems. The
people (whether it be users or
IT staff) can have objections
to change or possibly do not
have the bandwidth to take on
another technology. Processes
suffer a similar challenge in
that there may be compatibility
issues; especially with legacy
applications. These create
problems when it comes to
adopting a new technology; as
the migration processes can be
difficult and many organisations
need a compelling value to make
the effort worthwhile.
In my practice, I advocate that
the effort of change is worth it
when you consider key benefits
– such as a better Availability
experience. This is a fundamental
driver for many changes. For
example, an organisation may
need a robust disaster recovery
strategy, but in order to get there
some legacy applications need
to change. They can’t have the
rich disaster recovery experience
without key modernisations; this
becomes a business discussion:
Can the legacy technologies
give the business the Availability
experience they need? n
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