​Mr Steve Herridge, Chief Executive Officer, Internet Solutions West Africa said server virtualisation is a precursor and enabler to cloud computing and that Nigeria is on the cusp of joining this global technology trend. Mr Herridge dropped this hint at the breakfast meeting with the media, current and potential clients in Lagos.

 

According to him, “A few years ago, companies were centralising all their distributed systems back into the data centre. And then they went through a phase of consolidation of their server environment and storage environment. Now, everything in this space globallyis about virtualisation,” says Herridge.

 

Virtualisation in ICT can be viewed as part of an overall trend in enterprise IT that includes infrastructure sharing, the goal of which is to centralise administrative tasks while improving scalability and workloads. Internet Solutions managed cloud service; outsourced firewall and mail solutions are part of a bouquet of services on offer by the company to ensure that Nigerian businesses are optimally using their IT infrastructure.

 

The event which saw attendance fromrepresentative of key organisations withinthe banking and finance, telecommunications industries amongst others was an interactive session on the real information and communications technology issues and challenges that are faced by businesses operating in Nigeria.Herridge continues that the cloud is attractive to companies because “it allows a much more dynamic delivery of IT services.”

 

In anticipation of the shift to cloud computing, enabled by the improved communication networks in Nigeria, many companies are trying to rebuild and re-architect their data centres for these new technologies.Gbenga Runsewe, Sales & Marketing Director for Internet Solutions West Africa said: “We’re fundamentally wanting to assist customers to build virtual data centres, and get their internal data architected in a way that will enable them to support a cloud computing strategy, which is location-independent computing allowing shared servers to provide resources, software, and data to computers and other devices on-demand”.

 

In helping customers develop a virtual data centre, Runsewe says strategic partnerships are essential. “VMware for us is a critical component. It’s the leading virtualisation software in the world. We’ve been aggressive in building skills on VMware in other countries in Africa.”

 

 

The benefits of Internet Solution’s approach to virtualisation is that it enables our customers to migrate relevant application and IT services to a cost effective virtualised platform in step by step manner, reducing the capex costs and modelling that is inherent in this deployment.  Effectively customers can use our infrastructure and Virtual servers as a service, increasing flexibility and reducing costs.

 

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