Oluwafiropo Tobi Ogundare, Territory Sales Lead for West Africa & Mauritius at Red Hat. (Image: Red Hat)

In the wake of certain market developments, many businesses across West Africa now have questions regarding virtualisation and the platforms they use to develop, deploy, and modernise their IT workloads and applications. 

Even though cloud adoption among businesses is fairly consistent across Africa, conversations about this topic in the region are not as mature or in-depth as those taking place across the rest of the continent.

This is also tied to a behaviour trend where IT leaders and teams opt for virtualisation technologies only after they have been tried, tested, and proven to work in their respective industries. 

While this may enable them to avoid potential investment and implementation pitfalls, it can slow the rate of business transformation and innovation.

Businesses have the potential to not only reap the full benefits of virtualisation and a hybrid cloud strategy, but accelerate transformation and growth with the use of platforms that modernise applications and enable cloud-native development.

On the ground and in the cloud

At its core, virtualisation is about extracting as much value from a company’s IT infrastructure and hardware as possible. 

Companies can no longer afford to dedicate physical servers to single, specific applications, not when the result is higher operating costs and capacity going to waste.

 Virtualisation creates an abstraction layer that enables organisations to run multiple operating systems, programmes and applications by partitioning servers into multiple virtual ones, maximising the utility of the hardware and delivering a greater return on investment.

Though traditional virtualisation primarily focuses on consolidating resources, it has evolved as more and more organisations adopt a cloud-native IT strategy. 

For example, containerisation now serves as a lightweight alternative to virtual machines (VMs) by sharing the same OS kernel, which improves resource allocation even further. 

Platforms such as OpenShift, which is built around Linux containers orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes, enable organisations to manage their VMs and containers more easily in cloud-native environments, a critical component in the hybrid and multi-cloud age.

To meet changing market demands and the demands of future application development, West African enterprises need to have a migration plan for their virtual workloads in place and as part of their infrastructure modernisation strategy.

From the old to the new

Today, applications sit at the heart of modern business. To improve delivery performance by updating older legacy systems, the modernisation process for most organisations involves re-platforming existing workloads onto a new cloud platform, as well as breaking monolithic applications up into smaller components like microservices.

This is not always a straightforward process. Alongside conventional challenges such as potential business downtime and unforeseen costs, applications are not always adaptable to meet the business outcome or customer needs of the day. 

Many may also not fully integrate with third-party systems, which can limit an organisation’s ability to add new services or partner up with other businesses.

What’s needed is a foundation that is consistent and provides the extra support that businesses need. Hybrid cloud platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift enables organisations to develop, deploy and manage their applications across environments, guaranteeing no room for error.

The role of people and technology in building security resilience perability and offering customisation opportunities through a certified partner ecosystem. Migrating workloads onto Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, a core feature of Red Hat OpenShift is also made easier with the help of a free migration toolkit for virtualization, which simplifies the process and enables migration at an enterprise scale.

Setting the stage for the future

Businesses in West Africa, like those in every region, are now looking to see how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models can transform their organisation and their customer offerings. 

AI is now a top priority for the C-Suite and, as a result, IT departments and teams need a platform that enables them to build, deploy and manage AI-enabled applications in any given environment.

Fully embracing AI is achieved through consistency and empowerment. Red Hat OpenShift AI lets data scientists, engineers, and app developers share the same platform and collaborate more effectively, deploying applications and getting them to market much quicker. 

Another benefit of OpenShift is that organisations can utilise common open source and third-party tools to perform AI/ML modelling, giving them the flexibility to innovate and deliver added value.

In enterprise IT, everything is connected, and thus West African businesses need to scrutinise how platforms not only fulfil their needs, but how they increase their overall agility, give them space to innovate, and streamline processes to free time and resources to work on the next big project.