Vodacom Business has partnered with Digital Parks Africa, a provider of wholesale datacentres, to enhance support for clients’ off-premise datacentre requirements.

According to the companies, cloud has become the foundation for the new and agile business world, as it allows organisations to scale infrastructure as needed to support changing business priorities.

Through the alliance, business clients will now be able to benefit from subject matter expertise in the provision of datacentre managed services from both Vodacom Business and Digital Parks Africa reads a statement released by the companies.

While many sectors of the economy have been hit by COVID-19, ISPs, IT infrastructure providers and datacentres, have seen a significant increase in demand primarily as a result of the shift towards home and remote working.

The datacentre has become the backbone of enterprise IT.

Vodacom Business and Digital Parks Africa say they are fully equipped to manage and host IT platforms, allowing organisations to focus on their core business without worrying about downtime or technical issues.

“Vodacom Business has proven to be a trusted partner to businesses of all sizes within the datacentre and colocation space. Our extensive datacentre footprint and capabilities can provide the necessary foundation for businesses of all sizes to change and face digital disruption head-on,” says Kabelo Makwane, Managing Executive for Cloud, Hosting & Security at Vodacom Business.

“In the past, large organisations were the only ones who were able to access these types of technology and facilities. However, through partnerships and continually improving our infrastructure, businesses of all sizes can use our facilities and provide the products and services needed in our increasingly digital world.”

Meeting business requirements

Cloud computing has become increasingly integral to business operations in the past year, as companies have had to adjust to remote working conditions while needing to be agile, cost-effective, resource-efficient and innovative with technology.

“There’s a growing trend towards companies migrating their data to the cloud, even in multi-cloud environments. Cloud environments come with Everything-as-a-Service, allowing organisations to focus on their core business operations,” Makwane adds.

Most enterprises, in particular those in regulated sectors of the economy, who are required to keep their data on premise or observe strict privacy, including data sovereignty compliance, can benefit from colocation in localised datacentres to host their IT infrastructure assets with associated high-speed connectivity, the partners say.

In other scenarios, enterprises will require a hybrid approach to their cloud journey, where they can progress from a ‘lift and shift’ approach to move their infrastructure into a hosted environment, then gradually migrate to hosted private cloud and as they become more comfortable with cloud technology over time, move to full public cloud adoption.

“As an AWS Outposts Ready partner in Africa, given our Tier certified datacentres, we are able to deploy AWS Outposts Hybrid Cloud and Public Cloud. Similarly, we are able to also deploy Azure Stack hybrid cloud and Huawei private cloud infrastructures just as well. These datacentres afford enterprises a cloud adoption journey which is flexible and is on their terms while protecting their existing IT investment as they modernise and transform their IT operations," says Makwane.

Vodacom Business asserts that the Vodacom Cloud Hosting Data Centre offers clients a way to protect their business from increased mobile and enterprise security threats while remotely monitoring their cloud hosting environment and more.

“Cybersecurity remains a concern for businesses of all sizes as protecting devices, networks, client data and apps is an essential component of doing business in today’s digital world. To this end, Vodacom Business offers products and solutions to protect clients from today’s increasingly sophisticated online threats,” the companies add.