Beyond the blackout: The silver lining is in the cloud

It seems like yesterday, and yet a lifetime ago, that the technology industry had to deal with one of the greatest crises of recent times — the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Overnight, the industry was tasked with implementing digital systems and infrastructure that would take the core operations of South African enterprises and allow them to function online and remotely. Clients wanted it to be “business as usual” in the most unusual of times — a seamless transition to the digital transformation they and the country needed.

Tech companies made it happen; they found solutions and had the technology to do so.

But now SA is faced with a challenge that dwarfs the pandemic. There is no greater threat to businesses than load-shedding. It is that simple and that stark. It affects the country’s people and the industries attempting to stabilise and grow the country’s economy. 

Blackouts are the most disruptive challenge of our generation. Just ask the CEOs of large enterprises who have been speaking about how hard they've been hit. Ask the business leaders who fear the greater knock-on effect across all sectors. Ask the Reserve Bank governor who says almost a billion rand is lost every day in SA. Just ask economists who estimate almost a percentage point has been shaved off the country’s GDP.

As with the pandemic, the technology industry needs to find solutions to the challenges load-shedding creates for large enterprises, in particular. The silver lining is in the cloud.

The cloud has been the defining trend in technology for years. Back in 2015, one of the worst years of load-shedding with a recorded 2003 hours of blackouts, there were talks about how it was forcing more companies to not only migrate to the cloud, but to take more of their operations there. Eight years later, the conversation needs to be less about possibly moving to the cloud but about the absolute necessity to do so to future-proof enterprises.

The basics are that storing and transmitting data is reliant on power. It is estimated that data storage and transmission use 1%-2% of global electricity, which is predicted to rise to a fifth of the world’s power output by 2040.

If you are an enterprise that hosts your own data centre on-site, this puts your productivity, continuity and security at the whim of a power supply that is under huge strain. The choice is either opting for significant capex in renewable energy or generators, or using the infrastructure and backup that is already on offer from cloud service providers.

That way you pass the problem of load-shedding on to the provider, who has already invested in the infrastructure. The big players in the cloud have their own redundant power and backup systems and, in many cases, have invested in renewable energy to keep their costs and the impact on the climate down. With the big players such as Alibaba, the data is backed up to multiple locations around the world, ensuring accessibility across your enterprise.

With a constant, safe backup of data, there are no continuity issues or lost data. Work can carry on normally during a power outage because the workloads and data are readily accessible. Employees are also able to continue working offline if needed and have their work backed up automatically to the cloud when the power comes back in their location.

The cloud’s benefits are enormous and ever evolving − agility, resilience, flexibility, better security, increase in performance and savings in technology spend — providing the potential to integrate innovation and expand the enterprise’s capabilities. The cloud is also becoming increasingly cost-effective. The benefits from the forced digital transformation will grow exponentially as companies move more of their workloads and structures to the cloud.

Just as the pandemic accelerated the move to the cloud, so too should load-shedding provide the necessary impetus for wholesale migration. The question companies should be asking themselves is not whether they need the cloud to help them remain competitive, but how they will function in a digital era without the cloud. It is the silver lining to take us beyond the blackout.

This article was sponsored by BCX.