Transforming the wayIT is delivered.

With six fully fl edged data centres in South Africa, more than 4 000 servers, 3.5 Petabytes of SAN storage, 1 460 databases and 400 Terabytes of unique daily data backups, Cybernest’s data centre operations are capable of supporting services on a large scale.

Cybernest has a comprehensive suite of solutions to meet your unique business requirements.

Flexible…secure…sustainable.

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Business cloud computing

Cloud computing is without a doubt one of the most talked about concepts in the ICT industry today and leading CIOs are realising that it can strategically cut

costs and drive innovation. “The cloud represents an evolution in the provisioning of elastic computing that is fl exible and scal-able to meet the changing needs of organisations,” says Grant Morgan, managing executive at Cybernest, Telkom's cloud ser-vices division.

Business cloud computing, ‘rain’ing in the promised benefi ts

“When deciding what equipment to buy, many businesses struggle to determine their exact needs, often resulting in over-spending. With cloud-based services, users can pay for what they need today and rest assured that as the business grows, so the infrastructure will scale according to their needs.”

An additional reason cloud computing is gaining ground world-wide is the promised benefi t of business fl exibility. By moving to-wards the cloud, organisations can get the technology they need without spending money on infrastructure, while allowing the ser-vice provider to manage the applications and datacentres.

“That’s what makes the cloud equally attractive to small busi-nesses that don’t have internal IT departments and to big cor-porates that want to save costs rather than spend money on expensive infrastructure and IT resources. Whether a company has no IT department, or would rather refocus its IT department on strategic eff orts or speed up new application deployment, the cloud is a great option,” adds Morgan.

Cloud-based services enable companies to turn their IT ex-penses, normally a capital cost, into an operating item in the budget, and to use their cash for other projects that are more strategic to the business. It also means they have access to the latest technology, while maintenance, operations and integra-tion are all taken care of by the service provider.

“A critical consideration is the fact that the average business today cannot aff ord to own the level of technology off ered by cloud-based service providers. These multibillion-rand environ-ments are designed to be robust and redundant and to cater for multiple users.”

Because of economies of scale, cloud-based service pro-viders can aff ord to implement, manage and maintain the best

For more information: www.cybernest.co.za | enquiries@cybernest.co.za | 0809 339 339

technology, the highest-performing disks, fully redundant net-works and so on. “This kind of reliability and resilience is simply not possible on a regular company-owned network without in-curring huge costs,” adds Morgan.

There is also a green component to the cloud. “By operating their own datacentres, businesses run more processors, more drives and use more power than is actually necessary, whereas multi-tenancy ensures that the infrastructure is more evenly uti-lised and thus more energy-effi cient,” he says.

SELECTING A SUITABLE BUSINESS CLOUDSERVICE PROVIDER“A business cloud solution needs to be an end-to-end service,” states Morgan, “and that includes the network component. Without ser-vice guarantees on the network, how can it be a business-grade service?” he asks. “Insist on a comprehensive service level agreement (SLA) that covers the access network and the data-centre services. CIOs also need to ask the right questions about the service provider’s archi-tecture and how it has been designed. Find out about connectivity, resilience, redundancy and performance.”

This is not possible on an internet-based cloud off ering where you have no guarantees about performance or availability of data over the public internet.

“In addition, the datacentre location needs to be known to fulfi l governance and compliance requirements (something that is not possible with public internet cloud infrastructures). Your data should not be in some location overseas, where you don’t know where it is. Your local systems should interface to the cloud system and data should be shared between them rather than sending data over the internet to an un-known cloud location.

“Your provider should have an operation with suffi cient scale to ensure reduced costs be-cause of the effi ciencies realised. The larger the scale, the better the buying power, so the pro-vider should be able to source equipment at a better rate than you can yourself.

“These may seem like complex questions, but if users ask several providers, they’ll be able to get an idea of how they compare and stack up,” he says. It’s also essential to ensure that the service provider has the requisite staff in place behind its off ering.

The operation needs to scale to provide 24/7 services pro-vided by dedicated specialist technical skills, not generalist, or over-worked IT department staff . Your service provider should

have better resources and skills.This speaks to operational excellence,

Morgan notes. “You need to hand over to someone who is better than you at running IT. The service provider needs to excel at processes, security and governance.

“We have one of the largest IT opera-tions teams in the country, with over 550 people,” says Morgan. “This gives us scale on the back of billions of rands worth of infrastructure plus operational experience going back to the day Telkom’s consum-ers fi rst started getting bills for their tele-phone accounts. We have the telco-grade mentality to ensure things are robust and stable. We are the largest fi xed-line data network provider in SA, with 140 000-plus kilometres of fi bre that enables us to pro-vide high-speed bandwidth access over the largest VPN in the country with data-centres connected at the centre of these networks. This brings down the cost of connectivity because there is no long last mile. We also have redundant fi bre out of every datacentre to connect to the shared networks our customers hook onto. That half of the network connection is solidly re-liable. Cybernest has the reach to build out private business-class networks in the far reaches of the country. There is no fi nger-pointing when the network is down – we own the cable in the ground, we will fi x it if your cloud solution is down.”

This reach and reliability is critical if busi-nesses are going to realise the true benefi ts of business cloud computing.

Telkom Cybernest recently conducted a customer benchmark study asking the top CIOs in the country what their views were on cloud computing adoption.

• 52 percent are planning to adopt cloud in the next 12 months

• Top adoption drivers include: cost reduction (27 percent), fl exibility/elastic computing (21 percent), the need to improve IT service levels (17 percent) and business agility (17 percent)

• 24 percent of customers are planning to migrate software applications to the cloud, whereas 22 percent are planning to use the cloud for dis-aster recovery and web services respectively

• When looking to partner with a cloud service provider, 22 percent of customers cited service level agreements as the top selection criteria, followed by price (21 percent) and security credentials (15 percent)

Grant Morgan, Managing Executive, Cybernest – Telkom's cloud division

Cloud computing is without a doubt one of the most talked about concepts in the ICT industry today and leading CIOs are realising that it can strategically cut

costs and drive innovation. “The cloud represents an evolution in the provisioning of elastic computing that is fl exible and scal-able to meet the changing needs of organisations,” says Grant Morgan, managing executive at Cybernest, Telkom's cloud ser-vices division.

Business cloud computing, ‘rain’ing in the promised benefi ts

“When deciding what equipment to buy, many businesses struggle to determine their exact needs, often resulting in over-spending. With cloud-based services, users can pay for what they need today and rest assured that as the business grows, so the infrastructure will scale according to their needs.”

An additional reason cloud computing is gaining ground world-wide is the promised benefi t of business fl exibility. By moving to-wards the cloud, organisations can get the technology they need without spending money on infrastructure, while allowing the ser-vice provider to manage the applications and datacentres.

“That’s what makes the cloud equally attractive to small busi-nesses that don’t have internal IT departments and to big cor-porates that want to save costs rather than spend money on expensive infrastructure and IT resources. Whether a company has no IT department, or would rather refocus its IT department on strategic eff orts or speed up new application deployment, the cloud is a great option,” adds Morgan.

Cloud-based services enable companies to turn their IT ex-penses, normally a capital cost, into an operating item in the budget, and to use their cash for other projects that are more strategic to the business. It also means they have access to the latest technology, while maintenance, operations and integra-tion are all taken care of by the service provider.

“A critical consideration is the fact that the average business today cannot aff ord to own the level of technology off ered by cloud-based service providers. These multibillion-rand environ-ments are designed to be robust and redundant and to cater for multiple users.”

Because of economies of scale, cloud-based service pro-viders can aff ord to implement, manage and maintain the best

For more information: www.cybernest.co.za | enquiries@cybernest.co.za | 0809 339 339

technology, the highest-performing disks, fully redundant net-works and so on. “This kind of reliability and resilience is simply not possible on a regular company-owned network without in-curring huge costs,” adds Morgan.

There is also a green component to the cloud. “By operating their own datacentres, businesses run more processors, more drives and use more power than is actually necessary, whereas multi-tenancy ensures that the infrastructure is more evenly uti-lised and thus more energy-effi cient,” he says.

SELECTING A SUITABLE BUSINESS CLOUDSERVICE PROVIDER“A business cloud solution needs to be an end-to-end service,” states Morgan, “and that includes the network component. Without ser-vice guarantees on the network, how can it be a business-grade service?” he asks. “Insist on a comprehensive service level agreement (SLA) that covers the access network and the data-centre services. CIOs also need to ask the right questions about the service provider’s archi-tecture and how it has been designed. Find out about connectivity, resilience, redundancy and performance.”

This is not possible on an internet-based cloud off ering where you have no guarantees about performance or availability of data over the public internet.

“In addition, the datacentre location needs to be known to fulfi l governance and compliance requirements (something that is not possible with public internet cloud infrastructures). Your data should not be in some location overseas, where you don’t know where it is. Your local systems should interface to the cloud system and data should be shared between them rather than sending data over the internet to an un-known cloud location.

“Your provider should have an operation with suffi cient scale to ensure reduced costs be-cause of the effi ciencies realised. The larger the scale, the better the buying power, so the pro-vider should be able to source equipment at a better rate than you can yourself.

“These may seem like complex questions, but if users ask several providers, they’ll be able to get an idea of how they compare and stack up,” he says. It’s also essential to ensure that the service provider has the requisite staff in place behind its off ering.

The operation needs to scale to provide 24/7 services pro-vided by dedicated specialist technical skills, not generalist, or over-worked IT department staff . Your service provider should

have better resources and skills.This speaks to operational excellence,

Morgan notes. “You need to hand over to someone who is better than you at running IT. The service provider needs to excel at processes, security and governance.

“We have one of the largest IT opera-tions teams in the country, with over 550 people,” says Morgan. “This gives us scale on the back of billions of rands worth of infrastructure plus operational experience going back to the day Telkom’s consum-ers fi rst started getting bills for their tele-phone accounts. We have the telco-grade mentality to ensure things are robust and stable. We are the largest fi xed-line data network provider in SA, with 140 000-plus kilometres of fi bre that enables us to pro-vide high-speed bandwidth access over the largest VPN in the country with data-centres connected at the centre of these networks. This brings down the cost of connectivity because there is no long last mile. We also have redundant fi bre out of every datacentre to connect to the shared networks our customers hook onto. That half of the network connection is solidly re-liable. Cybernest has the reach to build out private business-class networks in the far reaches of the country. There is no fi nger-pointing when the network is down – we own the cable in the ground, we will fi x it if your cloud solution is down.”

This reach and reliability is critical if busi-nesses are going to realise the true benefi ts of business cloud computing.

Telkom Cybernest recently conducted a customer benchmark study asking the top CIOs in the country what their views were on cloud computing adoption.

• 52 percent are planning to adopt cloud in the next 12 months

• Top adoption drivers include: cost reduction (27 percent), fl exibility/elastic computing (21 percent), the need to improve IT service levels (17 percent) and business agility (17 percent)

• 24 percent of customers are planning to migrate software applications to the cloud, whereas 22 percent are planning to use the cloud for dis-aster recovery and web services respectively

• When looking to partner with a cloud service provider, 22 percent of customers cited service level agreements as the top selection criteria, followed by price (21 percent) and security credentials (15 percent)

Grant Morgan, Managing Executive, Cybernest – Telkom's cloud division

brainstormJust think.