EDITOR’S QUESTION
solutions that ensure the reliability,
recoverability and effectiveness of your
data, wherever it is located.
Leveraging data
According to the 2019 Veeam Cloud Data
Management Report, companies plan to
spend close to R600 million on deploying
cloud data management technologies
to build an intelligent business within
the next 12 months. Part of this includes
using technologies such as Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and IoT to drive
organisational success.
Opportunities abound on the continent
when it comes to leveraging data
in progressively innovative ways. In
healthcare, for example, the data captured
from pacemakers can enable medical
professionals to detect the onset of a
heart attack even before a person is
showing external symptoms.
TRENT ODGERS,
CLOUD AND
HOSTING
MANAGER, AFRICA
AT VEEAM
frica has always been
considered a mobile-
first environment. Now,
thanks to the growth of
the cloud, the continent
is finding increasingly
innovative ways to leverage mobile with
data availability strategies.
A
In certain respects, the data is coming closer
together thanks to the public and managed
cloud, but in other respects it is also moving
further away because of the Internet of
Things (IoT) and Edge Computing.
The rise of micro data centres
The use of smaller, distributed,
connected data centres that are closer to
concentrations of users and generators
of content/data is becoming necessary
to support modern workloads. These not
32
Issue 07
Backup remains fundamental
only augment traditional data centres but
improve performance across the entire
organisation by reducing pressure on
enterprise networking resources.
Today’s technologies allow Edge
environments to be managed from
a centralised location with complete
visibility into and control of the micro data
centres at the remote sites.
And, with the growth of virtualisation
and solutions such as software-defined
architectures and hyper-converged
infrastructures, micro data centres are
becoming much easier to deploy and
manage than ever before.
Whichever technology you use to build
your Edge Computing micro data centres,
you must make sure that you focus on
availability and deploy modern availability
When it comes to data availability, it
shouldn’t matter whether your underlying
technology platform comprises of a
centralised data centre, multiple clouds,
an Edge Computing environment or
some combination of all the above. And
it shouldn’t matter if you are supporting
centralised workers, remote workers,
mobile workers or connected devices.
They must all have uninterrupted access
to and from the applications and resources
they need at any time from any location.
Even though businesses are still figuring
out how best to generate income from
Edge devices and IoT, the fundamentals of
backup, recovery and continuity still need
to apply.
It is imperative that the appropriate
redundancy measures are in place in the
event of a disaster. To do any less risks
significant problems not only from a
compliance perspective but a customer-
service one as well. ◊
www.intelligentdatacentres.com