Organisations today are increasingly demanding more value, improved operations and positive business results. One way to close this gap is to deliver ‘as a service’ programmes to meet the above with predictable, consistent and reliable outcomes.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has emerged as a feasible option that maintains crucial infrastructure such as IT, power consumption and business continuity while organisations focus on their core business.
In South Africa, we are seeing an increase in IaaS adoption with managed service providers delivering innovative, critical infrastructure services. And the benefits are numerous, particularly to those businesses that require consistent secure power and IT to operate at peak performance.
Why IaaS makes sense now
In the case of IT infrastructure, organisations often must commit to considerable CAPEX to acquire and maintain the technology. Here, managed service providers can play a valuable role as they own the infrastructure and manage it on behalf of the organisation. This means the organisation not only saves on acquisition and installation time but only pays for what it uses, be it secure power, IT infrastructure or cooling, or all the above.
Organisations are now freed to focus on their core business while the experts service and manage the infrastructure. This also enables businesses to predict their monthly expenditure and manage their operation costs accordingly.
The provision of secure power is another important IaaS benefit. Secure power provides critical protection to IT infrastructure and, importantly, business continuity. It enables organisations to operate while mitigating the potential loss of business earnings.
At its core, secure power provides clean, continuous power and encompasses equipment such as uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) standby generators and automatic voltage regulators and so forth.
When this infrastructure is then delivered to organisation on an IaaS basis, it is then called Secure-Power-as-a-Service (SPaaS).
At Schneider Electric, we have seen SPaaS starting to enjoy some uptake, albeit on a smaller scale. Managed service providers are now starting to provide secure power to customers using, for example, a pool of single-phase UPSs, installed on site. The organisation is then billed for the usage of the SPaaS.
There is no doubt that the local marketplace is ready to start adopting SPaaS. The world is moving towards a consumption economy where it only pays for the experience and not for the assets that enable it.
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