Standard Bank South Africa is moving its core SAP Cloud Platform services to Microsoft Azure to significantly improve customer experience.
This accelerates the digital transformation of SAP customers to S/4HANA by partnering with Microsoft and using jointly developed reference architectures, roadmaps, and industry best practices. Many enterprises are looking to reduce their reliance on their own datacentres and moving more of their core workloads to the cloud.
Sabelo Nkwanyana, Standard Bank’s CIO for Personal and Business Banking SA, says leveraging the computing power of Microsoft and the product innovation capability of SAP demonstrates how Standard Bank is embracing partnerships and ecosystems to develop customised solutions for its clients.
“SAP has a deep understanding of our business requirements and how we want to ensure our customers are happy with our service offering. This partnership continues our focus on innovation by leveraging the respective skills of SAP and Microsoft to transform the digitisation and personalisation journey for our customers,” says Nkwanyana.
Lillian Barnard, Managing Director, Microsoft South Africa says, “The Project Embrace initiative between Microsoft and SAP announced globally last year is centred around the customer journey to SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud Platform on Microsoft Azure. The work that we are doing with Standard Bank is the first local demonstration of this partnership, and another milestone in the journey Microsoft is on with Standard Bank, to bring innovation into every aspect of the bank’s IT system and enable enriched interactions with the bank’s customers.”
The partnership brings together SAP and Microsoft, along with a global network of selected system integrators, to move on-premise SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA customers to the cloud through industry-specific best practices, reference architectures and cloud-delivered services.
Barnard continues, “Enterprises are migrating to cloud providers at an accelerated rate. This makes it critical for our customers to have the right cloud infrastructure in place, enabling them to unlock the power of innovation. Microsoft’s significant investment on the African continent, with our first hyperscale datacentre regions in Johannesburg and Cape Town, means many more partners and customers are enjoying the benefits of our intelligent cloud platform.”
Speaking on the SAP partnership specifically, Barnard adds, “Project Embrace has three tenets at its heart: simplify, accelerate and innovate. By accelerating our customers’ digital transformation journey, we are enabling them to become agile, efficient digital enterprises on Microsoft Azure – with a cloud platform optimised for SAP – leveraging best practice and specialist expertise.”
“Today’s announcement is the biggest partnership centred on SAP implementation in Africa. With client experience a key strategic pillar for Standard Bank, Project Embrace reflects the shared commitment of both SAP and Microsoft to accelerate our customers’ journey to the cloud,” says Cathy Smith, Managing Director at SAP Africa.
This project will deliver a unified approach to how Standard Bank runs SAP S/4HANA in Microsoft Azure. Ultimately, this will help the bank deliver a faster time-to-market on products and services, while ensuring its IT infrastructure is optimised. By moving workloads to the cloud, Standard Bank will be able to access a range of features that it can deploy instantly and scale according to demand. This will result in cost reductions, improved system performance, and access to innovation.
“This will empower the bank to create new business models and deliver more personalised outcomes in today’s dynamic business environment. By providing Standard Bank with consistent engagement and delivery models, SAP and Microsoft bring both industry-specific best practices and deep local insight to deliver a compelling value proposition for their clients,” says Smith.
“Through Project Embrace, we are now able to better identify our business pain points and effectively address them through technologies that deliver a demonstratable return on investment. Having the ability to more accurately predict where customer challenges and dissatisfaction will occur enables a more flexible enterprise environment. We can help our customers transform their businesses and their lives in a secure way. This is much more than SAP and Microsoft supplying us with products. This is about fundamentally enhancing our digital journey for the future,” concludes Nkwanyana of Standard Bank SA.
In addition to the work done with Standard Bank, the Microsoft and SAP initiative is assisting customers around the world, and in a variety of industries, accelerate their journey to becoming digital, intelligent enterprises.
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Microsoft will establish a new datacenter region in Israel in 2021. The Israel datacenter will start by offering customers Azure cloud services and followed later by Office 365 services. The new datacenter region will enable customers use Microsoft’s advanced technologies. Whiles adhering to data residency requirements to store data within Israel.
This will bring to six, the total number of Microsoft datacenters in the Middle East and Africa region. Increasing Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure to 56 cloud regions. Israel and Qatar cloud regions planned to go live in 2021.
Offering Microsoft Azure and Office 365 from a datacenter region in Israel forms a key part of our investment, shares Michel van der Bel, President, Microsoft Europe, Middle East and Africa.
When I speak to customers across EMEA, it is clear that the power of the cloud is essential for their competitiveness. We have made significant infrastructure investments in the region. As infrastructure is an essential building block for the tech intensity that public sector entities and businesses need to embrace.
Microsoft believes startups in the country will benefit greatly from the local datacenter in tangent with its startup program.
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More business are moving their operations to the Cloud. Hybrid Cloud Adoption is expected to accelerate this growth at a rapid pace. Thus confirming that the future of cloud computing may well be hybrid.
Business Group Lead for Cloud and Enterprise at Microsoft Middle East Africa Multi Country Cluster covering North, West, East, Southern Africa, Levant & Pakistan, Mr. Wale Olokodana, shares on this subject matter. He addresses some of the benefits and challenges of moving your business operations to the cloud. What businesses need to do, to ensure they get the most from the cloud technology.
As many
organisations head to the cloud, the first stop might be ‘hybrid’
Companies across the Middle East/Africa are discovering hybrid solutions can solve many digital transformation challenges.
Moving to the cloud is
not unlike relocating your business to a prime piece of real estate. The
benefits are many, but the transition can be tricky. As governments and
businesses race to take advantage of cloud computing, they are navigating
current and future data regulations, as well as how to make the most of
existing IT infrastructure.
Across the Middle East
and Africa (MEA), businesses are prioritising cloud adoption. Research shows most
organisations in the Middle East are either using cloud computing services or
plan to do so in the next two years. African businesses are following closely, with
cloud adoption becoming near
pervasive.
With its improved security
and cost savings, cloud has become key for businesses looking to compete in the
digital era. But there are sometimes obstacles on the road to digitisation, and
this is where hybrid cloud is playing an invaluable role in helping businesses
digitally transform.
Hybrid cloud enables
businesses to store and process data in their on-premises private clouds and
take advantage of a public cloud provider. Hybrid cloud computing is a “best of
all possible worlds” platform, delivering all the benefits of cloud
computing—flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiencies.
Data
regulations and the cloud
One particularly
important consideration when it comes to cloud adoption is regulatory
compliance, and many of these policies are still being created across MEA.
Countries in the Gulf Cooperation
Council have begun addressing issues around data privacy at a
national level, but as it stands there is no overarching law that deals with
data protection in the region. The African Union
Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection has also recently made
an appeal for countries to start adopting stricter legal frameworks for data
protection purposes.
In Kenya, for example, The Data Protection Bill, 2019, was recently enacted and will regulate the processing of personal data and information governed by General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) . Those violating this law face a penalty notice of up to five million shillings, or in the case of an undertaking, up to two per centum of an organization’s annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher.
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Future-proofing your IT strategy
Hybrid cloud is helping
organisations future-proof their digital strategies, allowing them to explore
the benefits of the cloud for data storage and applications, while using their
existing on-premises servers for information, other applications and data with
data residency implications.
It was for this exact reason
that Oman Data Park (ODP), a leading IT managed services provider,
deployed Microsoft Azure Stack, a hybrid cloud solution. ODP offers hosting,
security and cloud services as well as virtual data centre services, leveraging
its own data centres in Oman. But when it came to delivering on its digital
transformation promises to clients through the provision of Azure services, ODP
needed to navigate the Sultanate’s regulatory requirement to store data
locally.
Utilising
existing technology investments
Hybrid cloud is particularly
important for companies like banks, which have significant existing IT infrastructure
investments. With hybrid cloud computing, banks
can maintain their mainframe systems while simultaneously adopting new cloud
technologies. Banks are using Azure Stack to link their current systems, while
building an intelligent layer of digital services on top. The Microsoft
Azure cloud platform then supports scalable hybrid environments for moving
between on-premises and cloud computing environments seamlessly.
Sterling Bank is aimed at improving the time-to-market and improving
the service quality to its customers. The bank prioritized
cloud services, the cloud-first approach was the rationale behind the selection
of Microsoft Azure – for building, testing, deploying, and managing
applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data
centers. So far, the bank has already deployed several products including Fare
Pay which is addressing transportation; Specta – a community lending solution
which gives out loans in 5 minutes; i-invest which is now a popular product in
the market that allows anybody to buy or trade a treasury bill. Another
consumer propositions that the bank introduced is OnePay – all which were
deployed via Microsoft Cloud.
Is the future
hybrid?
Innovations to cloud
computing are also making it easier to manage hybrid cloud environments.
Microsoft recently launched Azure Arc, enabling businesses
to use Azure cloud tools across different cloud and computing services. As most
organisations have IT infrastructure spread across multiple datacentres, clouds
and edge locations, the ability to run on-premise and multi-cloud environments
from one central space is a game-changer.
Not surprisingly, hybrid cloud adoption is expected to
accelerate at a rapid pace – confirming that the future of cloud computing may
well be hybrid. This is particularly the case in the Middle East which is
already outpacing the average global adoption rate.
When deploying from
the hybrid cloud, businesses have more control over their IT, improving the
latency and reliability of their services. This would make hybrid cloud a
particularly attractive option for businesses operating in the Middle East and
North Africa, which is one of the most under-represented areas in the world
when it comes to per capita Internet
connectivity.
As businesses set out
on their hybrid cloud journeys, it is important they begin with specific
business objectives in mind, considering company needs and priorities. This
will help them determine which workloads should be shifted to the cloud. Achieving
the right balance between public and private cloud usage involves several
different considerations, such as IT budget, regulatory requirements, as well
as the nature of different applications and where they are best deployed.
Partnering with a service provider that can manage and integrate your company’s different IT environments can help ensure your business optimises its hybrid cloud investment and that, ultimately, the move to becoming a digitally empowered business is much smoother.
Microsoft Middle East and Africa Cloud Society is organizing a certification contest. That will see three winners receive a return air ticket to Cape Town, South Africa. The winners will attend a special Microsoft Media Event as well as DevConf 2020 software developer conference. Another ten winners will be selected for various prices including lunch with a Microsoft subject matter expert.
Microsoft says the contest is “to train IT professionals, developers and students in the Middle East & Africa on Cloud technology, while also rewarding them”. Everyone including Microsoft Partners are eligible to participate in the cloud society certification contest. Oh you must be eighteen years and above.
The skill-based contest is however opened to only people from the following countries. South Africa, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kenya, Nigeria, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Lebanon and Mauritius. Let’s find out how to participate if you are eligible.
This is how the contest reads out;
Play an instrumental role in strengthening the security posture of your organization with professional cloud computing courses. Begin your journey today by taking our free, specialized courses on Security, powered by Azure on Microsoft Cloud Society and get incredible rewards along the way. What are you waiting for?
Steps to winning a trip to South Africa and DevConf 2020
1. Register to become a member of the Microsoft Cloud Society. If you aren’t already a member. Registration is free. If you are a member sign in with your account details. Kindly note that you’ll need to link your LinkedIn profile to your registered account.
2. Complete any 2 courses from the Security(Microsoft 365 Security or Azure Security) or 1 course from the Modern Workplace learning paths.
3. Get a free Course Completion badge/trophy from Microsoft when you complete the course.
4. Create a public post by sharing your Course Completion badge on LinkedIn or Facebook using the hashtag #iamacloudhero.
5. The top 10 posts with the highest total number of likes and shares on March 1st 2020 will win one of the below prize.
Receive a one year LinkedIn Premium subscription
Be featured on the Microsoft Cloud Society Homepage
Have lunch with a Microsoft technical expert
6. Now to win the an all-expenses-paid trip to South Africa and attend DevConf 2020 and the special Microsoft Media event, you’ll need to take one more major step. That is get Microsoft certified for the course you took. Take a paidexaminationrelated to your course. Note that Microsoft cloud society members recieve a discount on the exams fee.
7. Share your Course Completion badge/trophy and paid Completion Certificate on LinkedIn and Facebook using the hashtag #iamacloudhero.
8. The top three participants with the highest total number of post likes and shares will get a chance to go to Devconf, Cape Town in March 2020.
Got any other questions, thoughts or suggestions about the contest? Share them with us in the comments. Don’t forget to share this with anyone who will like or benefit from this. Thank you.
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Automation Anywhere Paves Path to the Cloud with Microsoft Azure
Automation Anywhere, a robotic process automation (RPA) company announces integration of its products with Microsoft cloud. Bringing its purely web-based RPA platform seamlessly to customers worldwide using the Microsoft Azure cloud.
Organizations worldwide will now be able to access, Automation Anywhere Enterprise A2019 from Azure. Simplifying their entry in to RPA from anywhere, at any time. Hence this will allow thousands of new users to improve business processes with intelligent automation.
The company’s RPA platform can either be hosted on Azure, on-premises, in a public or private cloud. Helping drive customer productivity, increase innovation and boost ROI the company says.
“We’re excited that Automation Anywhere is using the power of Azure AI to usher in the future of work. Lila Tretikov, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Artificial Intelligence and Mixed Reality, notes. Automation Anywhere’s approach aligns with ours, which is to infuse data and intelligent automation into our product portfolio.”
“More organizations than ever before are seeing incredible benefits from their RPA implementations. Allowing them to become more competitive, productive and reduce costs. All by freeing up employees to focus on what they do best. To be creative and innovate“. More organizations will achieve these advantages faster in our expanded collaboration with Microsoft. Chief Corporate Development Officer, Automation Anywhere Peter Meechan, shares.
Customer benefits from the integration will include the following;
Expanded mutual artificial intelligence (AI) offerings. With the combination of Automation Anywhere’s IQ Bot with Azure Cognitive Services. To intelligently digitize, extract and process unstructured data hidden in electronic documents.
Advance business user productivity by running and managing Automation Anywhere bots directly within Microsoft Excel for improved user experience.
Use software bots to automate complex business processes and provide deep integrated capabilities with Microsoft products, including Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Teams with a single click enabling ease of use
Accelerate time to value by using more than 150 pre-built Microsoft bots from the Automation Anywhere Bot Store to complete automation projects faster.
