Harnessing HCI 2.0 enables businesses to recover through innovation
18 October 2021
The global ban on travel, instituted by countries across the world last year in response to the outbreak of Covid-19, has had a particularly devastating impact on Mauritius, whose entire economy is largely underpinned by tourism.
We saw an overall acceleration of digital transformation for many Mauritian companies amid the initial phase of the pandemic, with many being forced to rapidly adopt Work From Home (WFH) strategies to continue operating. Most organisations were unprepared for this and the pandemic situation has ushered in a whole new level of awareness for enterprises around the importance of digitally transforming their respective operations. At the same time, IT budgets were reduced drastically given the prevailing uncertainties, with many IT projects put on hold while others were cancelled as companies struggled to maintain top-line growth.
To ensure adequate cashflow, local companies are increasingly looking at adopting operating expenditure (OPEX) models rather than continuing with traditional capital expenditure (CAPEX) strategies. The growing interest in subscription-based solutions has placed cloud adoption high on the agenda of many companies in Mauritius.
Predict IT spend
Given the current economic situation, enterprises need to keep expenses at their lowest and be able to predict their IT spend, so cloud adoption is a highly strategic move. This enables businesses to save on property rental costs, reduce electricity spend and – most importantly – enable IT teams to focus on more value-generating tasks within the organisation.
With the reopening of borders, business activities are now getting a much-needed boost. Organisations need to accelerate their IT Infrastructure refresh plans to be able to compete and to maximise on the new opportunities being created.
Ideally, Mauritian organisations need to look to a fully-fledged Managed Services Provider (MSP) that can deliver end-to-end services ranging from IT to managed data connectivity and security solutions. The right partner will deliver an entire hybrid cloud-based IT ecosystem that is locally hosted and offered as an OPEX model that is quoted in local currency.
Due to compliance requirements and legal constraints, as well as the costs and risks associated with public cloud providers, local partners have positioned themselves to give customers a cloud experience where they can host their workloads in a cloud environment, but within the limitations of these constraints.
Cost savings and flexibility
Businesses looking to achieve significant cost savings and gain ultimate flexibility would benefit from a hosted data centre environment powered by disaggregated Hyperconverged Infrastructure (dHCI). dHCI or HCI 2.0 is an intelligent platform that disaggregates compute and storage and integrates hyperconverged control for simple management on a flexible architecture.
An HCI 2.0 platform enables organisations to scale very fast in response to rapid data growth – in a very flexible and affordable manner. There is no need to invest into a complete HCI node, as the storage and compute nodes are able to scale independently.
HCI 2.0 technology is the perfect solution to achieve a hybrid cloud environment allowing seamless data mobility between the private and public cloud.
Another major benefit that companies derive from partnering with a local cloud service provider is the level of local support they can expect. When considering a cloud solution, support is a critical consideration for enterprises, given the fact that they are storing their sensitive data with the solution provider and thus need assurance that this data is accessible as per set Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
With borders now opened, companies need to move fast to restart IT projects while also achieving cost efficiency. It is key that organisations team up with a solutions provider that can deliver innovative, cost-effective and multi-industry technology solutions that respond to companies’ ever evolving business requirements.