Having achieved great success in the Fibre to the Home market, integrated ICT and infrastructure provider Vox is looking to build on these strengths by expanding their push into the Fibre to the Business market with bundled offerings that are designed to bring more value and savings to local companies in a tough economic environment.

The Covid pandemic and resulting intermittent lockdowns – together with the looming threat of loadshedding – have resulted in a paradigm shift in business, with many having to adopt remote working policies, which includes adopting solutions to make their onsite data and applications more widely available and finding innovative ways of synchronising their IT support with a remotely connected workforce.

“While they might use multiple methods of connectivity to access their applications and data remotely, having a fibre line as the primary means of connectivity ensures a higher level of reliability.,” says Jacques du Toit, CEO at Vox.

According to Barry Kemp, Head of IaaS at Vox, the levels of efficiency, consistency and ease of access all play a role in determining the overall success of a brand, and Fibre to the Business provides the stability, consistency and low latency required to ensure this. Other noticeable benefits for businesses includes:

  • Enhanced speeds: any efficient organisation thrives of speed – whether it is for accessing data, uploading, downloading, sharing files or exchanging information – and using Fibre to access cloud-based services is the best way of boosting organisational productivity
  • Reliability: in a digital age, your business can’t afford to be disconnected, and a Fibre line ensures less downtime, meaning more consistent delivery.
  • Security: while some organisations are hesitant to shift to the cloud (and remote working) due to security concerns, Cloud in most cases is more secure than on premise and with Vox Fibre you are able to run a secure virtual network between your office and the Vox Cloud.
  • Cost: In the long run, users of a combined cloud and Fibre package have noted more cost-effectiveness, more room for scalability, increased ease of access and general improvement in quality control – in essence letting them do more despite spending less.

“Why would you purchase a premium cloud solution and not supplement it with tools to maximise its performance? Our Fibre Solutions are to Cloud what the perfect engine is to your vehicle. Optimised for efficiency, growth, and flexibility, they’re also systemically designed to enhance your overall experience,” says Kemp.

Co-location as a first step

According to Du Toit, with the increasing preference for work from home – or in some cases a hybrid model that blends remote and office based working – businesses are downscaling their office space and are looking for alternatives to hosting servers on their office premises. For those that have decided not to keep their infrastructure onsite, there are a host of options available, including co-location at a data centre, hosted virtual servers, or increasingly a hybrid of the two.

With Co-location, organisations are provided with rack space within state-of-the-art data centres that adhere to international standards and include redundant connectivity and power supply to ensure that they always remain connected to their business critical IT infrastructure. This is ideal for organisations that need to sweat their existing IT investments, or have policies that require certain types of data to be stored within their own environments.

Making cloud work for business

For those who want to move away from maintaining their own IT infrastructure, the Vox Virtual Data Centre offers a truly elastic virtual data centre that offers organisations a virtualised pool of cloud infrastructure and resources including compute, memory, storage, licensing and networking – helping boost day-to-day productivity, capacity planning and management.

Data shows that up to 30% of cloud migrations rolling back, and over 80% resulting in budget overruns largely because they are not scoped correctly, and Kemp adds that Vox has adopted a three-step process – Assess, Migrate, Manage – in order to ensure organisations have the right information, services and skills to make a successful transition into the cloud.

“Vox provides organisations with advice and guidance in order to maximise their IT infrastructure investments. We now offer multiple infrastructure solutions that can be used to mitigate many of the challenges that businesses are facing and to improve their overall IT – allowing them to concentrate on running their business,” says Du Toit.