With the official launch of the Microsoft Data Centres in South Africa, Blue Turtle has announced a suite of services that enables a customer’s journey to the cloud.
Blue Turtle will deliver Azure Migration Services that encompass discovery, assessment, migration, optimisation, operation and security. The services leverage technologies, which analyse a customer’s existing environment, optimise system utilisation prior to migration, create the target Azure specification, assess Azure costs and provide for automated migration.
“This really is the moment that South African business has been waiting for,” said Avash Maharaj, Head of Infrastructure and Operations at Blue Turtle.
“Those cloud migration plans that have been on the backburner due to data sovereignty, network costs and security concerns are now a thing of the past.
“The challenge for customers is to determine what can be moved, migrate systems quickly and efficiently, manage the quality of service while avoiding cost overrun, both in the migration and then for on-going cloud use. Through our solutions, services and Microsoft partnership, we are uniquely positioned to be able to provide customers with a fool proof mechanism by which to evaluate cloud opportunities and exploit Azure in a controlled, speedy and cost-effective way.”
Blue Turtle is currently assisting many enterprise customers with assessments that will help them understand their environment, and plan and migrate in a controlled manner, allowing them to embrace the Microsoft Cloud offerings. According to Maharaj, while the roll out to the cloud can be done timeously, preparing for the process, understanding the costs and securing the budget are the key building blocks to a successful project. He has urged customers not to take short cuts that in the long run will result in a poor return on investment.
While the company uses industry recognised frameworks, it is one of few partners in the region that is able to also provide migration, cost control, service monitoring and security capabilities. Furthermore, Blue Turtle is the African partner for Turbonomic, software that has been earmarked by Microsoft itself as a preferred solution to assist with workload automation for a hybrid cloud environment, and helps customers to optimise performance, compliance, and cost in real-time.
As an example, using Turbonomic, Cloud Services International, a global consulting and technology services company, was able to expand its Azure footprint and automatically deliver the application performance and policy compliance the business needed – while at the same time reducing cloud spend by 20 percent.
“Our approach to customers who are looking to migrate workloads into the Microsoft Data Centres is to ensure they get the planning and assessments right, once this is in place we will architect the most appropriate plan for their migration – ensuring that the move is seamless,” added Maharaj.
“In 2018, research giant IDC estimated that cloud services in South Africa would generate nearly 112,000 new jobs in the country by 2022 and that spending on public cloud services will nearly triple over the next five years, up from R4.29 billion in 2017 to R11.53 billion in 2022. These figures are huge – but again we caution customers to ensure they map their cloud strategies properly before they take the leap.”