Towards connected Clouds

Earlier this week Symantec addressed the key drivers of cloud adoption in South Africa and announced its future vision of many connected clouds that are safe, agile and efficient.

In South Africa cloud computing is not a new phenomenon, and small startups and large enterprises alike are seeing the cost savings and resource optimization that comes from outsourced IT services. However, concerns remain due to concerns around where data is stored and how it is secured.

Today, the cloud landscape is rapidly changing. In South Africa, businesses understand the benefits of cloud solutions and are willing to adopt this new approach, but adoption rates are still slow. A survey conducted by Symantec revealed that eighty-three percent of respondents in South African are confident that moving to the cloud will have either little impact on or will actually improve their security. However, the same survey revealed that despite a great deal of consideration, many organizations are not ready to adopt cloud due to lack of experience among IT staff. The survey revealed that only 25 percent of IT teams have cloud experience and only the minority (between eight and fifteen percent) rated their staff as extremely prepared for the transition to cloud.

‚”There is a huge potential for cloud computing for organizations of all sizes in South Africa, particularly with the increasingly challenging threat landscape, the shortage of IT skills and the lack of understanding of cloud technologies‚”, said Mark Smissen, Business Development Manager for Symantec.cloud in Africa. ‚”Symantec.cloud offers hosted IT services to help ease IT and security concerns and set customers minds at ease knowing their IT is being handled by reputable experts and being hosted out of a data center based in South Africa‚”.

Symantec is also looking ahead to the future of cloud and predicts that in five years, companies will operate in a converged IT world of cloud, virtualization and mobile computing where clouds are safe. IT organizations will have better visibility, control and compliance across their private and public clouds. To get there, Symantec extends its security, data storage and information management expertise to help companies transition to safe clouds of the future.

‚”Symantec has proven solutions with industry leading technologies to protect companies, information and people,‚” adds Mark Smissen. ‚”Wherever companies go with cloud, Symantec will provide the protection and control they need across hosted services, public and private cloud environments.‚”

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