09 Dec African Distribution Group Bets on Cloud as the Future with Cloud-Hosted DRaaS

Alviva Holdings, one of Africa’s largest ICT products and services providers has invested in a robust, cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) and backup solution.

Partnering with VMware Cloud Verified Partner Routed, the distribution giant is using a consumption-based DR-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution hosted on VMware Cloud at two of Routed’s data centres. The engagement has been so successful that Alviva Holdings is now investigating using the cloud platform to run its enterprise application workloads.

With a strategy for growth underpinned by acquisitions, the company’s IT infrastructure is complex and lacked a single centralised DR solution. Recent widespread unrest and vandalism in South Africa that targeted key infrastructure sites and threatened data centres, has created the need for organisations to consider business continuity beyond just one location.

While the company initially set out to create a single DR site in Routed’s Johannesburg data centre, the project evolved into a multi-site environment including hosting its DR in Routed’s Cape Town data centre. The extensibility of its systems was central to the success of the project, and because Alviva is predominantly a VMware house, Routed could easily replicate its entire DR environment in its Cape Town data centre. This strategic product alignment allowed Alviva to seamlessly integrate with Routed’s infrastructure while ensuring the infrastructure remained secure, compliant, and scalable. In addition, Alviva benefited from Routed’s technical team, and its extensive VMware expertise as a Cloud Verified Partner, to architect the environment and provide the cloud real estate to host it and support the company’s migration to a full DRaaS environment.

Morné van Heerden, Group CIO, Alviva Holdings, said: “The real deciding factor for our business was that we weren’t required to invest in equipment, hardware, or software. It is scalable, customisable, immediately accessible DR, and it’s consumption-based – which fits our IT spend model. We achieved the first successful DR tests in the company’s history that were quicker than any other alternative solution we had looked at.”

Andrew Cruise, CEO, Routed added: “It wasn’t an easy decision for Alviva, as whatever technology they chose had to be better than what one of the group companies could provide. While Alviva elected a specialist, third-party provider with specific expertise for only one product at the beginning, this has now expanded to a more encompassing VMware Cloud from which the company is starting to draw more company-wide value.”

In the future, Alviva is looking to expand its cloud presence, moving enterprise application workloads onto the Routed VMware Cloud environment. In addition, it is looking at VMware Aria Operations Cloud from Routed to assist with monitoring, reporting, capacity planning and insight into its operations.

Sumeeth Singh, Cloud Provider Business Head, for VMware Sub-Saharan Africa, added: “Within our cloud ecosystem, there’s a common misconception that VMware Cloud providers just host virtual machines. Instead, partners like Routed offer the full stack, akin to a public cloud hyperscale provider, in terms of visibility and everything moving up the stack from the VM. In short, cloud providers have been put into a hosted cloud bucket or virtual machine hosting place, where in fact, if you look at Alviva and Routed as an example, they offer a whole lot more.”