Cloud adoption across West Africa remains a net positive as growing demand leads to increased availability of infrastructure and vendors.

Still, there is always the potential for organisations to lose control of their spending, whether it’s because of internal circumstances or ones beyond their control.

No cloud strategy is complete without a cost management system in place, and that system becomes more critical as competition in the region reaches new levels and cloud service providers work to offer the best value proposition to enterprises.

The key to success lies with enterprises taking a more rounded, long-term view of cloud computing, treating it as an ongoing expenditure that requires continuous monitoring and collaboration, backed by new management practices and clarity on what they want the cloud to do for them.

Managing cloud costs with the help of FinOps

Companies move to the cloud for many reasons, but chief among them are the benefits of flexible and scalable IT infrastructure at a higher level of cost efficiency. But that efficiency isn’t always guaranteed.

Mismanagement and a failure to properly migrate to or handle cloud resources can lead to companies overspending.

This can be the result of overprovisioning resources or underutilising them, inflated cloud data transfer and storage costs, cloud misconfigurations, or a lack of governance and oversight.

West African businesses need a cloud model that suits them, whether it’s pay-as-you-go, a fixed monthly or annual subscription, or reserved or spot instances that provide extra flexibility to enterprises and potentially offered with sizable discounts.

At the same time, they can utilise cost control features such as resource tagging, APIs for real-time usage notifications, and AI/ML-powered analysis and forecasting tools that are now readily available.

A big component of cloud cost management is FinOps, which combines finance and DevOps for maximum accountability and oversight.

Cloud environments are inherently complex and so to achieve cost optimisation, all relevant teams need to be hands-on and aware of how budgets are being spent.

FinOps also allows enterprises to more effectively enforce governance and compliance procedures, which in turn inform and shape the financial decisions enterprises need to make.

The hyperscale value proposition

Never before have African businesses had such a level of choice when it comes to cloud service providers. At the same time, hyperscalers have evolved their value offering as the cloud becomes standard practice for businesses, and they themselves become invested in helping businesses achieve their organisational goals.

When selecting a hyperscaler to partner with, businesses in West Africa should consider the following factors:

• Cost: Easily the most important factor, businesses can determine the value offering of hyperscalers based on their committed spend agreements as well as hyperscalers’ effort to expand their capacity, partnerships, and capabilities as a holistic cloud services provider.
• Compatibility: Businesses cannot waste capital and resources having to retrofit their existing applications to be compatible with a new computing environment. By prioritising interoperability as part of the selection process, they can identify which providers can deliver the smoothest migration process.
• Scalability/Agility: Hyperscalers must be able to respond to businesses’ IT needs, scaling systems and allocating resources as needed. This includes handling data transfers efficiently.
• Support: Not every business has the same level of access to cloud skills and expertise, and should therefore be able to turn to their hyperscalers for support.

Hyperscalers have also begun to increase their focus on data sovereignty and residency, addressing concerns related to data protection and compliance, itself a growing concern among African enterprises.

With features such as local availability zones and specialised privacy solutions, enterprises can keep their data where it needs to be and adhere to any relevant data regulations.

Collaboration makes for resilient, cost-effective cloud

Making cost management a part of your enterprise’s cloud migration strategy isn’t difficult, not when it is built into both hyperscalers’ service offerings and the platforms that enterprises today use to build applications and software.

For example, enterprise containerisation software can come equipped with a cost management tool that enables businesses to track their cloud spend and understand the cost of their clusters, either in the public cloud or on-premise.

But more than that, enterprises need to assume a collaborative stance with their cloud and platform vendors, making them a part of the organisation’s journey and digital transformation.

They are invested in your future because it is tied to their own, and it’s through collaboration that enterprises can achieve the best results and build the next generation of cloud-enabled business applications and solutions.

The post The Cloud Doesn’t Have to be Costly for Your Business | Here’s How appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

However, each organisation has to confront the potential for a security incident. Case in point, according to Check Point’s African Perspectives on Cyber Security report for 2024, Nigeria faces one of the highest rates of cyberattacks in Africa, with organisations being attacked on average 3,759 times per week.

The country’s finance sector alone faced an average of 4,718 attacks per week thanks to key vulnerabilities such as weak multi-factor authentication and outdated systems.

When modernising infrastructure and applications, organisations cannot consider security after the fact. IT security is ideally ‘baked’ into any platform or application they utilise, thus reinforcing themselves with an adequate level of resilience against incidents and threat actors.

Security starts from the ground up, and with the help of the right platforms and their features, organisations can make it a cornerstone of their modernisation efforts.

What it means to ‘modernise’

Today, any modernisation plan related to enterprise software and systems is an exercise in optimisation or opening the door to integrating new technologies. Done correctly, the benefits are numerous.

Organisations enjoy improved performance and scalability, increased resource efficiency, and reduced costs.

On the flip side, modernising systems sets the stage for artificial intelligence (AI) and enabled applications, increased use of data analytics, migration to cloud environments, and other technological trends that influence present-day business.

Application modernisation is of particular importance to the modern enterprise. According to the Red Hat State of Modernisation report, 95% of survey respondents believe that modernising their applications is essential for their organisation’s success, a process that encompasses many different initiatives such as improving continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines and data modernisation.

At the same time, security is one of the most cited reasons for modernisation. Indeed, modernised applications benefit from improved security features, making them less vulnerable to threats and contributing to the overall resilience of the organisation and its systems.

In doing so, organisations rethink their security practices and align them with the new operating reality.

Layering security

As more and more businesses in West Africa migrate to cloud environments and IT infrastructure becomes increasingly complex, they need to shift their security approaches.

Because they no longer have a defined security perimeter, traditional measures won’t be sufficient. For example, the first step organisations can take is to centralise their identity management and access controls, assigning employees and users only the minimum access required to do their jobs.

From there, organisations should execute a layered, in-depth security strategy and prioritise vendor platforms that cater to it.

Operating systems, which let organisations prioritise a security-focused foundation for applications and processes, should have built-in tools that help organisations meet security compliance requirements, including implementing and improving physical and network security.

Container platforms should offer network controls, integrated certificate management, and network micro-segmentation for increased container security.

Finally, organisations should select an automation language and platform that everyone across the organisation can learn and use.

In doing so, organisations can easily leverage access control, logging, and auditing capabilities across all (modern) IT functions and teams.

With so much on the line and the threat landscape constantly growing, this is how businesses in West Africa can take a holistic approach to IT security as they continue to digitally transform.

From the applications themselves to the platforms used by development and operations teams, security becomes a tentpole as innovations take enterprise IT to a whole new level.

The post With Modern IT, Security Can’t be an Afterthought appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.