6 August 2019, Johannesburg: With the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market expected to exceed $76 billion by 2022, local companies are investigating how best to embrace this shift as they migrate to the cloud. To this end, integrated ICT and infrastructure provider, Vox has unveiled its IaaS Monitoring solution to help simplify the transition.

“Traditionally, IaaS offerings provide customers with the platform to run their services. However, when it came to taking care of their servers and systems, they had to do it themselves. And while this provided them with complete control over their own implementations, inevitably the ongoing maintenance became problematic,” says Barry Kemp, head of managed IT at Vox.

Given the growth of the cloud in recent years and the arrival of multi-national data centres in the country, more businesses started moving services to an online environment. Unfortunately, many decision-makers incorrectly assumed that because their data is hosted in the cloud, it would be safe.

“Even though the cloud environment is secure, a shared responsibility approach has to be applied. Depending on the cloud service model used, the client still needs to take responsibility for the security of its own servers. It is in this space where our offering comes into its own,” says Kemp.

The Vox IaaS Monitoring solution comes in two versions – monitoring, and monitoring with patch management.
The former sees Vox monitoring things such as CPU, memory usage, and patch status of client servers. It then sends a notification to the customer if an alert is triggered or when a new patch becomes available for installation. And as the name suggests, the latter sees Vox install the patch on behalf of the customer.

“Even though many customers have their own internal IT resources, they are often focused on other strategic activities with patch management falling by the wayside. With the Vox solution, they can continue delivering on their business objectives with us taking care of the onerous patching work and other server monitoring functions as it impacts their IaaS solutions,” he concludes.