Is your business structured to thrive despite - or even because of - today’s business environment and tomorrow’s new challenges?

TSTT and VMware hosted a webinar recently to discuss this issue and detail how cloud-based technology, delivered by a best in class data centre provider, could dramatically improve a company’s financial profile while providing it all the tools to better manage the current business challenges and be ready for the future.

Within an information-packed, 90-minute forum, presenters from both TSTT and VMWare described the challenges that businesses today faced, what a future ready business needed, bmobile’s Cloud Services, VMware’s Cloud Strategy, and TSTT’s own migration experience when it made the move from a traditional IT infrastructure to Cloud infrastructure in 2016.

The tech experts also addressed customer concerns about cyber security - including whether a virtual virus could cause community spread, portability if one wanted to move data or migrate to a different cloud, reliability and speed of access to data, ease of scaling services up or down, and even what support TSTT could give to IT managers needing to make a case to their Board or CEO for a budget to make the transition.

The event host, Stuart Franco, set the stage for the webinar by outlining some of the challenges confronting businesses, stating:

“There have been a lot of disruptions in the market of late. That disruption has come in three main areas:

1. As managers or board members we are all expected to find a way to do more for less.

2. With COVID-19, work is different. Life is different. All our IT teams have had to find themselves ramping up and have a capture of this massive increase in work from home and all the necessary IT that is required to make that possible.

3. The entrance of millennials into the workspace and into the consumer space. Millennials have a very high expectation of efficiency and when they’re conducting business with your organisation, they expect an efficient turnaround.”

Franco also noted that “TSTT has made key investments in a world class data centre and was the first in the region to have a TIA that met the most rigorous international standards in the industry.”

What was his advice on how to deal with these disruptions? He said: “To succeed in an age of disruption brought on by the speed of change in technology and in more recent times, the shifting of the everyday ‘way we do business’ model, organisations need to build a future-ready business using these three simple steps.

Step 1 - Think Big. Do not let the size of your business or financial constraints impede your overall vision.

Step 2 - Start Small. Once you have your vision, identify simple projects to start you on your digital journey.

Step 3 - Scale Sustainably. Keep the momentum going - before the first project is completed, start planning and implementing the next one.

He added: “Remember, ‘perfect is the enemy of good’ when it comes to creating a legacy of transformation. It’s much better to start your digital journey rather than waste time trying to get it right.”

TSTT’s Ian Galt, General Manager Enterprise Services, is excited about the role TSTT is playing in helping clients on that journey. He noted that for startups, “it’s about how do I disrupt, how do I find a niche; for existing businesses, it’s about how do we reinvent ourselves. In addition, businesses are constantly looking to drive costs down,” he said.

The Telecoms industry is an example of what’s possible, he said. “There are telecom providers today providing services and they have no infrastructure whatsoever. They don’t have one router. They don’t have one bit of fiber in the ground…What they do is they go to a large telecoms provider, white label it, and all they do is provide the billing service and the customer service experience. Technology has allowed a niche to be created that would have been impossible 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago.”

TSTT’s Alan Murphy, Senior Manager-Commercial Operations (Ag.), said TSTT’s TIA 942-B certified data centre offered a full suite of cloud services: Co-location, Disaster Recovery as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Backup as a Service and Unified Communications as a Service, including Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) services for its global customers. “We typically have a solution for whatever customers are looking for,” he said.

Assuring that TSTT’s data centre provided customers all the peace of mind, flexibility and security they could ask for, Murphy outlined some of the features of TSTT’s Cloud services as: zero outages, dual power supplies, dual network feeds, virtual infrastructure with full self-service and manageability, and 24/7 support.