/ 26 August 2011

Budgets drive efficiency

Working smarter is the order of the day in most companies.

Many organisations today are totally reliant on their IT systems for the normal operation of their business. Most critically, these systems are often an integral part of an organisation’s risk management and compliance procedures, which have taken centre stage in the modern organisation.

This leaves the CIOs in an unenviable position: they are expected to operate with little or no budget increase, yet are required to ensure the seamless and efficient deployment of enterprise information systems.

“From a budget perspective the CIO is having to work smarter to deliver more value to the business without increasing the overhead. But from a business perspective they are also expected to cover off risk and compliance. It’s not an easy equation to balance, but newer technologies and approaches are available today that significantly reduce the pressure on them,” says Mariana Kruger, IBM’s Business Continuity & Resiliency Services Leader for the Middle East and Africa.

It is in response to its keen understanding of business needs that IBM has developed its Smarter Computing framework, which aims to provide organisations with flexibility, scalability and cost advantages that they would otherwise struggle to achieve.

The essence of this strategy is the much-vaunted cloud computing, which Kruger says has developed in leaps and bounds over the past few of years. Central to IBM’s strategy is the tripartite mantra of Designed for data, Tuned to the task and Managed in the cloud.

“The demand for data storage capacity is one that simply won’t be going away, and is in fact doubling every 18 months,” she says. “According to our research 15 petabytes, or 15 000 terabytes, of new data is being generated globally every day. And despite the significant decline in storage costs, companies are seriously challenged by this demand.

Consider also the phenomenon of varied and distributed devices like smartphones and tablets that CIOs now also have to accommodate in their systems.”

Many South African data centres, almost 40% according to IBM figures, are facing serious capacity and infrastructural constraints that threaten to cripple businesses — either due to inefficiency or the astronomical cost of establishing new facilities. Efficiency is a key requirement in this equation, particularly due to the need to extract business intelligence from the mass of data companies generate daily.

Cloud computing solutions undoubtedly alleviate a lot of this pressure on organisations, although adoption in South Africa has been rather muted. Kruger says this is certainly changing and that challenges such as the cost and availability of bandwidth to support such solutions in improving.

According to the recently released IBM Global CIO Study, which polled more than 3 000 CIOs in 71 countries, cloud computing has risen sharply in their list of priorities from last year. In 2010 a third of CIOs identified cloud computing as a priority, almost doubling to 60% in this year’s study.

“This is as much a result of continued budgetary pressures on CIOs as it is the maturity of the technology and solutions being offered,” suggests Kruger.

Cloud solutions are also gaining popularity for their ability to help organisations meet increasingly stringent regulatory requirements, such as King III, which places emphasis on sufficient governance and risk management. Given the tremendous volumes of data and rather lengthy periods for which records are required to be stored, it is easy to understand why cloud-based data centres are growing in acceptance.

“Most organisations actually perform well in managing their data and event risks — viruses and the like and events such as acts of terrorism or natural disasters – but do not always manage their business or compliance risks to the same extent,” says Kruger.

“Handing over that responsibility to a trusted partner with the right tools can drastically reduce the pain of managing these systems internally.”

Kruger cites IBM’s Smarter Backup and Archival solutions that address storage, compliance and e-discovery needs and offer customers unprecedented control and reliability at a cost that they would otherwise struggle to achieve. One of the innovations that has been built into the backup and archival solution is the automatic compression of files to reduce bandwidth demand, while also introducing deduplication functionality that updates only changes to files rather than rewriting the entire file. “Innovations like this are helping CIO’s relook their storage to storage and storage to tape recovery” says Kruger.

“IBM’s Business Continuity and Recovery Services Centre currently provide a range of services to numerous customers across all the industries ranging from large enterprises to smalll and medium businesses. “This facility underlines the value in partnering with an organisation such as IBM, which is the only provider that can offer a truly end-to-end solution that spans hardware, software and services solutions dedicated to ensuring the efficient operation of a business,” says Kruger.

While Kruger says not all cloud are the same, “the strength of the cloud computing model, particularly for data and risk management, is that it is completely scalable and therefore suitable for organisations of any size, not only large enterprises.”

This article originally appeared in the Mail & Guardian newspaper as an advertorial.