Rising to the new era of dynamic innovation and digital transformation in Australia

Events of the past 18 months have pushed Australian businesses to rapidly innovate at the datacentre. With the need to quickly shift the business to the cloud, IT leaders have needed to re-think the datacentre environment in its entirety. This rapid innovation and transformation is likely to continue, too. As noted in the AFR, there is plenty of room for the changes that enterprises have made over the course of the pandemic to go much deeper going forward, and as KPMG has found, those companies that do continue to transform will be the ones to grow; 80 per cent of revenue growth will come from digital.

OVHcloud recently released new solutions to help businesses across the spectrum, from SME through to enterprise, to take full advantage of these opportunities. OVHcloud has deployed new, local, Bare Metal servers, that have a focus on speed and scalability, allowing users to deploy applications more quickly, with more resilient architecture. These servers, OVHcloud claims, are ideal for big data, machine learning, and critical database workloads, as well as Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI), Software-Defined Storage (SDS) and High-Performance Computing (HPC).

The OVHcloud Connect solution itself is about unlocking value in hybrid clouds. OVHcloud Connect allows customers to interconnect their on-premises and public cloud environments with OVHcloud through a secured connection. Finally, OVHcloud is further facilitating innovation in Australian IT environments with a Managed Kubernetes platform, which allows its customers to set up containerised environments, and OVHcloud’s teams will deploy, host, monitor and maintain the containers themselves.

Successful innovation comes from partnerships

OVHcloud remains committed to delivering leading solutions and unlocking the opportunity for innovation within its customers via partnerships.

For example, OVHcloud announced a partnership with IBM and Atempo last year, to bring together IBM enterprise tape technology and the Atempo software stack, while hosting and operating it in the OVHcloud to provide a seamless tape archiving solution for customers. Tape remains a critical element in many resiliency and data security solutions, as it continues to offer the most affordable way to archive large volumes of data, making it an ideal “final backup,” particularly for cold data.  (read more about this partnership here).

Meanwhile, OVHcloud has partnered with Capgemini to bring Capgemini’s deep experience in data protection, security, AI and analytics to help organisations create secure cloud infrastructure that meets regulations anywhere in the world (read more about the partnership here).

OVHcloud is rapidly expanding its network of partnership in Australia. It has announced a partnership with leading data centre provider, NEXTDC, to have dedicated services from two different locations, which will be utilised by OVHcloud to help its customers develop complete disaster recovery plans.

Additionally, OVHcloud has partnered with Megaport, a local leader in software technologies, to deliver OVHcloud Connect, a solution that increases performance across its stack, worldwide. Leveraging this technology means that OVHcloud can develop and deploy fully automated multi-cloud connections for SaaS platforms.

Key steps to an effective datacentre strategy

 The datacentre so core to the success of a digital transformation, and it is also one of the areas where so many transformation initiatives fail. As noted by BCG, only 30 per cent of transformation exercises meet their expected value.

To beat those odds, CIOs need to consider the following with their datacentre environment:

1. There is going to be continued acceleration. McKinsey has noted that some companies have accelerated their transformation and digitalisation by as much as seven years in just the last year. CIOs need to have an environment that is scalable, flexible, and has the kind of leading technologies that will prepare it for future change.
2. Partnerships are key. With datacentre environments being multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud, CIOs need to pay attention to the whole stack, and ensure complete compatibility and ease of management and deployment. The more holistic technology providers can be, the better.
3. It’s about more than just business resilience. Many of the investments over the past year into cloud environments were made to “keep the lights on” and enable employees to continue working remotely. Now CIOs should be looking at turning that into a competitive advantage; how can they leverage the cloud to enhance productivity, adapt an agile approach to work, and leverage the capabilities and speed of IoT and edge computing deployments?

OVHcloud has made the investments into the local market that will allow it to meet and exceed the needs that CIOs and IT leaders have of their cloud environments. SMEs gain access to a network of enterprise-standard technologies and solutions, and enterprise customers can leverage the highly scalable clouds solutions, sitting on tier-1 datacentres and fully compliant with regulation, to continue to innovate and develop applications securely and sustainably.

For more information on OVHcloud solutions for SMEs and enterprise, click here.