Five African countries are experiencing growth in cloud service roll out and adoption. They are Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Mauritius and Namibia, says Trent Odgers, Cloud Hosting Manager at Veeam.
According to Odgers this is because of improved connectivity across the continent, as well as the fact that data has become a core part of many businesses.
“The loss of their data or systems is no longer tolerated and thus needs to be “insured” backed up and protected and rapidly recovered no matter the scenario. Offsite Backup and Disaster Recovery as a service (DRaaS) has since become a key driver of cloud-based offerings, as it is often the next step on the journey.
“Many partners have delivered hosting services for decades, and those offerings have evolved to add additional services like offsite backup and DRaaS to complement their hosting services,” he said.
Odgers added that in 2020 many organisations may have taken a wait-and-see approach, but the pandemic has forced everyone’s hand and sped up digital transformation in all its guises.
This has spurred the rise of cloud-first strategies.
Security major factor
According to Veeam, security is a major factor that needs to be considered before the first set of data is sent offsite.
“As I have always said, it is about layers of security, having a plan and regularly testing that plan. It is important to ensure that the right people have the right access to the right information at the right time. As technology has advanced, it has become easier in some regards to create a secure connection, but with ransomware and other risks have been introduced, more needs to be taken into consideration,” said Odgers.
“Before, one of the only methods was to use VPNs to ensure that the connection and application was secure. As much as that secured the connection from A to B, it also created a connection into the business that needed additional layers to be secured. Now many products have cloud connect capabilities and APIs built directly into their products, which enables more secure methods of connecting, while ensuring that security is top of mind.”
According to Odgers, when it comes to the protection of those workloads and data, very strict methodologies need to be put in place.
“Data encryption is a good start, in order to ensure that no matter who gets access to the data and that data is kept secure. To send the data offsite, ideally a single port, that is secured with the right rules and that only the backup server can see and connect, will mitigate risk and has been proven to help many customers locally who have had their network compromised, as only the backup server can see the offsite target,” he continued.
Veeam said the adoption of cloud-based services continues to grow across a range of industries, including automotive, manufacturing, hospitality, government, healthcare, media, entertainment and legal.
“This is because data and its availability is important, no matter the size or type of the business,” said Odgers.
