South African SMEs are increasingly security conscious, and at the same time more inclined to move to the cloud.
“We see this trend emerging particularly among our mid-sized enterprise customers such as Gautrain and Safair,” says Executive Solutions co-founder and MD Richard Levine.
Executive Solutions, recently named Silver Partner of the Year in the Fortinet Southern African Development Community (SADC) Regional Partners of the Year awards, has specialised in IT consulting and management services for local SMEs for over 20 years.
Levine says SME IT trends have changed significantly over the years, with cloud and security now emerging as top of mind issues for many. Where only a few years ago, SMEs were reluctant to move their critical systems and IP to the cloud, mainly due to concerns around the complexity of migration, hidden costs of cloud services and security of core systems and data; many are now moving mission-critical systems and data into the cloud, he says.
“This change can be attributed to several factors,” says Levine. “One is that productivity and continuity are crucial, and cloud-based systems enable these. Also, migration to the cloud is becoming a lot simpler and security management significantly more effective, thanks to advances made by vendors such as Microsoft and Fortinet.”
Executive Solutions co-founder and CTO Gavin Bodill notes that developments such as the Fortinet Security Fabric and SD WAN are giving SME customers peace of mind in cloud migration and security management.
The Fortinet Security Fabric delivers broad protection and visibility to every network segment, device, and appliance, whether virtual, in the cloud, or on-premise. Automatically synchronize your security resources to enforce policies, coordinate automated responses to threats detected anywhere in your network, and easily manage all of your different security solutions and products through a single console.
Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN deployment provides next-generation security and advanced networking capabilities to improve WAN efficiency without compromising on security. It links network and security paths across the world through the internet, 3G/4G, or private WAN links, making it a truly borderless infrastructure for the enterprise.
“With these advances, we are able to offer our customers enhanced security and improved SLAs,” says Bodill. “For example, with customers moving into the cloud, their connectivity becomes a massive single point of failure. But with Fortinet we are now able to manage this risk more effectively, and with the refined SD WAN, we can ensure that a link not only functions, but that it delivers the expected levels of performance. This helps customers sleep at night and gives them more confidence about moving to the cloud.”
These new technologies, along with Microsoft 365 and Azure enhancements, are making cloud migration simpler and more viable for local SMEs, he says.