Vox, has introduced a comprehensive IT Advisory portfolio to assist medium-to large-sized businesses review current IT strategies or set new ones, particularly making the shift from on-premise to the cloud.
The IT Alignment Audit is a dynamic assessment that provides companies with a 360-degree view of their information technology landscape, and how it compares to best practice. The objective is to bridge the gap between business and IT to improve financial performance or market competitiveness.
Areas of focus for the audit include enterprise architecture, network topology, connectivity, voice, security, continuity, redundancy, IT asset utilisation, software versions status, and more.
“A key component is the cloud assessment, we will come into your organisation, use software to run an assessment on your entire hardware environment, and get detailed information on application server utilisation, software applications and versions, bandwidth usage, and more,” says Craig Freer, executive head: cloud at Vox.
“The outcome is a comprehensive report and a one-on-one technical analysis of the businesses IT environment with one of our virtual CIOs, offering companies detailed recommendations to reduce risk, and guidelines that should be followed in order to achieve best practice within the organisation,” says Freer.
Despite the prevalent economic challenges, the IDC says that IT spending by organisations in South Africa has grown at a faster rate than GDP over the past year, with cloud computing and services driving a large part of this. Research from the company shows that cloud is expected to grow by over 20% annually to reach R11,5-billion by 2022.
While more companies want to move their workloads to the cloud, they are not fully aware of the intricacies and the risks; the Cloud Readiness Assessment benchmarks an organisation’s current IT infrastructure down to a granular level, gain an understanding of the business requirements, and look at the value various services and processes that IT delivers to the business.
Vox uses this information to produce a total cost of ownership comparison to demonstrate the gains that can be made by making the shift to cloud computing, as a cloud architecture blueprint and implementation roadmap that brings together a public, private and/or hybrid cloud solution for the business.
Furthermore, the vCIO service can help businesses better understand the impact of technology on the organisation, plan for future requirements, improve internal efficiencies and even screen and interview IT job positions for a business, helping them gain the competitive advantage.
“What we have seen is that with the traditional IT model, businesses are investing in IT capacity not just for today, but also for the medium-term future, which has led to significant underutilisation of the existing infrastructure at present. A shift to the cloud can help local business address this, and ensure they get the best return on their IT investment,” Freer adds