Cloud, data centres solutions to sustain businesses during economic recession

For companies in Nigeria currently battling the recession, the challenges are slowing sales and reduced earnings due to spiraling costs from high inflation. To manage cash flows, your business may have to reduce or halt spending totally.

Today, the digital economy holds huge potential for entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). New digital trends such as cloud computing, mobile web services, smart grids, and social media, are radically changing the business landscape, reshaping the nature of work, the boundaries of enterprises and the responsibilities of business leaders.

However, the companies that will come out of the recession stronger must master the delicate balance between cutting costs to survive today and investing to grow tomorrow.

According to a survey by the Harvard Business Review, companies that deploy a specific combination of conservative and progressive strategies have the highest probability – 37 per cent of breaking away from the pack.

These companies reduce costs selectively by focusing more on operational efficiency than their rivals do, even as they invest relatively comprehensively in the future by spending on marketing, Research and Development, and new assets. This multipronged strategy is believed to be the best approach to surviving a recession and growing stronger into the future.

Adopting digital technologies is one strategy that businesses have adopted to optimise processes and drive new and improved measurable business results.

Chief Regulatory Officer, GSMA, John Giusti, said digital and mobile technology has delivered far-reaching social and economic benefits at both the global and national levels.

He said: “as the digital and mobile revolution continues to accelerate, new technologies – artificial intelligence, robotics and the Internet of Things, promise great benefits but also continued disruption resulting from the digitalisation of many industry sectors.

“Forward-looking policies can enable citizens, businesses, societies and countries to prosper, improving lives and livelihoods, while mitigating the possible adverse effects that can accompany economic change.”

Nonetheless, there is a cost to technology deployment and there is the need for managers to aim at achieving the right balance between the technologies they want and the ones they need.
One solution that allows companies deploy the technologies they need at lower costs is the adoption of outsourced data centre and cloud services as an alternative to company owned on premise data centres.

In Nigeria today, Market observers have argued that leveraging outsourced data centre services is one of the few options available to businesses to immediately reduce costs while pursuing a digital transformation strategy.

In a recent technology adoption survey of senior executives and business managers by MHI and Deloitte, colocation and cloud computing received positive considerations as a business optimisation strategy. About 45 per cent of these executives indicated their enterprises adopted such solutions, making it one of the leading strategies that businesses have embraced to achieve cost savings and enterprise agility.

Only few companies in West Africa provides the right data centre services for always-on enterprise businesses today. MainOne, as one of the firms, offers secure and reliable outsourced data centre services for enterprises in-country. These services are offered out of its MDXi Tier III Data Centre, already certified to PCI DSS, ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 standards.

Some companies such as eTranzact are already benefiting from these savings and the Chief Technology Officer, Richard Omoniyi, has stated that outsourcing the company’s data center hosting needs has drastically reduced the company’s operational and capital expenses as well as enhanced its flexibility and agility.

“Our Internet connectivity has been solely MainOne and with the excellent service rendered, it gave us the confidence to collocate at their MDXi datacenter which has been one of our best business decisions. Our budget has been streamlined with their cost effective services and we don’t have to bother about forex fluctuation,” he stated.

For the Chief Operating Officer, FBN Merchant Bank, Mrs. Funke Ladimeji, outsourcing the bank’s data centre hosting needs has drastically reduced its operational and capital expenses as well as enhanced its flexibility and agility.

Business analysts say premise hosting is more expensive compared to outsourcing, which offers between 20 and 50 per cent total cost of ownership reductions over a three-year period. By implication, firms that adopt outsourced data centre services could save between 20 and 50 per cent of their total IT budget while remaining competitive, flexible and more established in their respective sectors.