MTHULISI SIBANDA
JOHANNESBURG=` – INTERNET Solutions, the leading pan-African internet services provider, has launched SkyLight, said to be the first aggregated cloud services portal of its kind.

Executives said SkyLight delivered the world’s biggest cloud by providing access to the foremost local and global cloud platforms through a single portal.

Speaking at the launch in Johannesburg, Andrew Aitken, Executive: Cloud at Internet Solutions, says that enterprises have known for a while that cloud computing is one of the most important new technologies seen in decades.

“Chief Information Officers and Chief Financial Officers in particular are attracted by the proposition that cloud computing turns the economics of enterprise IT on its head,” said Aitken.

“On-site data centres are prohibitively costly capital investments, whereas the cloud allows consideration of an operating expenditure model because those hard costs are eliminated. But in practise, there is a
perception that shifting their invaluable data into the cloud is too difficult or too risky.”

With a single login and with one easy-to-use interface, SkyLight currently offers users on-demand access to cloud services from Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Internet Solutions Cloud and Dimension Data Cloud, with others to follow.

Internet Solutions’ Managing Director, Saki Missaikos, said the company had invested more than two years into the development of SkyLight in order to transform cloud computing from a platform-centric to a user-centric service.

“Cloud computing offers enterprises tremendous advantage from a financial, operational and sustainability perspective, but only if their business requirements are central to the design of their virtual environment,” Missaikos said.

– Guardian