Cloud / SaaS
Your Server vs Cloud – Considerations, Trade-Off’s and Costs – Part 4 – Resilience and Continuity
Expectations around system availability continue to evolve.
Cloud / SaaS
Expectations around system availability continue to evolve.
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Resilience and Continuity
| Topic | On Premises | Cloud (Microsoft Azure) |
|---|---|---|
|
Resilience |
When looking at resilience in the South African market, larger or more complex businesses may have a set of servers with virtualisation technologies such as VMware to provide some level of resilience against physical server failures or power-related disruptions. However, most businesses still rely on backing up their on-premises or data centre environments to either a secondary site or a cloud-backup provider to ensure business continuity during outages or infrastructure failures. |
When working with Azure, most “regions” (for example in Johannesburg or in Cape Town) are designed with resilient cloud infrastructure that provides significantly greater tolerance to hardware, cooling, networking and power-related issues than a traditional single-site on-premises setup. This becomes especially important in South Africa, where businesses may face challenges such as load shedding, connectivity interruptions or infrastructure instability, making cloud resilience a far more dependable option for operational continuity. |
|
Continuity |
Traditional disaster recovery (DR) environments in South Africa often involve replicating infrastructure to another data centre or secondary site. Businesses then need to consider reliable connectivity between locations, whether through MPLS, SD-WAN or fibre connections, to ensure users can continue accessing systems when needed. This may also require duplicating physical infrastructure such as firewalls, switches and storage environments, which can significantly increase both upfront and ongoing operational costs. |
Resilience within Azure’s core infrastructure design provides far greater flexibility in how disaster recovery environments are built and managed. For example, businesses can prioritise critical systems, such as finance or ERP databases, to replicate across cloud environments, while lower-priority systems may not require the same level of redundancy, creating a more cost-effective and scalable DR strategy. Azure Site Recovery can be used to replicate workloads and data between cloud environments without the need to build and maintain a secondary physical DR site. This significantly reduces infrastructure overheads while still ensuring business continuity, particularly for South African organisations looking to modernise without the cost and complexity of managing multiple physical environments. |
In Summary
Traditional server environments in South Africa often rely on backup strategies, secondary infrastructure and hardware redundancy to maintain operational continuity. While effective, these approaches can require careful planning, ongoing investment and additional consideration around local challenges such as load shedding, connectivity instability and rising infrastructure costs.
Cloud platforms offer an alternative resilience model, embedding availability, recovery, and scalability into the service framework itself.
This allows organisations to:
- Align availability and performance with business needs.
- Reduce certain hardware, power and infrastructure-related risks.
- Simplify disaster recovery and business continuity planning.
- Improve flexibility without the need for large upfront infrastructure investments.
Ultimately, infrastructure decisions should align with operational priorities, budget considerations and long-term growth strategies rather than a single “right” approach.
In the final article, we’ll explore commercial visibility and operational insight in the cloud era.
About the author: Liam Freeman is the Infrastructure Director at Klipboard. Klipboard IT, formerly known as Managed Services, helps organisations migrate to, optimise and manage Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 environments – on your own terms. Whether you want full end-to-end management or a co-managed model alongside your IT team, our Microsoft-accredited team delivers a secure, high-performance cloud infrastructure that’s tailor-made to fit your business.
Klipboard Managed Services also specialises in managing the cloud environments for companies in the merchant sector, in particular, users of Epicor – BisTrack and Intact IQ application software. Klipboard Managed Services is engaged with more than 50% of Epicor’s UK BisTrack user base and a growing number of North American BisTrack users. We have extensive experience managing and providing Microsoft Azure cloud environments.
Find out more here: Klipboard Managed Services
