BCX, a number one South African ICT firm, has efficiently accomplished a multi-million Rand, three-year transformation of its core community infrastructure, considerably strengthening the nation’s digital financial system. This text showcases how BCX tackled the challenges of outdated infrastructure to supply companies with the agility, reliability, and scalability important for thriving in a cloud-first atmosphere. Bob Lafite explores the undertaking’s affect, together with improved catastrophe restoration, on-demand scalability, and entry to superior applied sciences like XaaS.
Bob Lafite, Managing Govt Core Infrastructure at BCX examines the significance of long-term funding into South Africa’s connectivity ecosystem
A dependable and succesful connectivity ecosystem inside South Africa has the potential to rework enterprise effectivity, citizen service supply, and drive the financial system. Because the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) highlights – connectivity is the spine of digital infrastructure, offering the ‘basis for particular person and enterprise participation within the digital financial system’. Lengthy-term strategic funding into South Africa’s connectivity ecosystem is a dedication to accelerating this progress and making certain that organisations have the instruments they should change into extra resilient and agile in a cloud-first, application-centric market.
Infrastructure funding It additionally modifications service supply, eradicating the factors of friction attributable to ageing infrastructure that leads to important failures, poor efficiency and weak stability. When infrastructure isn’t future-proof it impacts customers on a granular degree – they will’t cost airtime, prospects can’t get assist, and programs go down when they’re below an excessive amount of strain. Firms don’t thrive once they function inside unreliable infrastructure.
That is the truth that drove BCX to undertake in depth infrastructure modernisation over the previous 4 years. Commencing within the pandemic – boldly enterprise transformative change at a time when most organisations had been hunkering down – the BCX infrastructure modernisation undertaking prioritised a elementary shift in direction of an application-centric infrastructure.
The transfer was a lot wanted. Previous to the core community improve undertaking, the infrastructure was a consolidated conglomeration of networks and companies from throughout a number of firms. After they all merged into BCX, they introduced their very own processes, capabilities and infrastructure into a fancy internet that took three years to consolidate and refine. Nevertheless, some infrastructure was greater than 25 years previous, different options had been restricted in scale, and total, they weren’t delivering optimum companies to prospects.
The infrastructure reboot was designed to scale back threat, improve {hardware} infrastructure, and transfer the corporate away from only a pure connectivity mannequin in direction of a extra agile ecosystem, permitting customers to hook up with a number of purposes and companies throughout completely different knowledge centres.
One of many priorities of the modernisation technique was to make sure prospects had peace of thoughts and agility round knowledge storage and catastrophe restoration. Catastrophe restoration has change into customisable, permitting for firms to find their catastrophe restoration web site in a unique province to their foremost manufacturing whereas making certain the websites are stored in sync. If a failure happens on one web site, firms can failover seamlessly to the opposite with minimal to no disruption. Configuring prospects in a number of areas is seamless – prospects can scale up capability, storage, and compute on demand from any knowledge centre at velocity. Shifting away from handbook processes in direction of immediate, remote-access administration has meant BCX can present prospects with fast flexibility and repair supply.
The complete modernisation undertaking took three years throughout fastidiously managed phased approaches. The corporate modified the tyre on the automotive whereas it was driving – fastidiously putting in and migrating programs with out impacting customer support supply and protecting as many companies operating as attainable. Scheduling and planning had been meticulous, and the result’s a core infrastructure able to dealing with intense buyer demand, assembly fashionable enterprise expectations, and offering backup connectivity if there’s an surprising occasion.
The core community can deal with the BCX strategic transfer in direction of something as a service (XaaS), offering a dependable basis from which services could be launched with ease. Connectivity, safety, catastrophe restoration and on-demand service supply come customary alongside in depth entry to peering factors throughout Africa. The corporate can even present direct connectivity to cloud suppliers which streamlines speeds and enhances flexibility.
Assembly the wants of shoppers the place they’re and able to dealing with the complexities of the South African atmosphere, the BCX core community improve has shifted the corporate’s gears. Fashionable, application-centric, service-driven and constructed on an agile basis able to remodeling XaaS and offering firms of all sizes with trusted, strong, and dependable service supply throughout bodily, wi-fi and LTE connectivity, the BCX community is constructed for Africa.