SA businesses shift focus from infrastructure resilience to modernisation

South African businesses are shifting their focus from infrastructure resilience to modernisation, according to a recent survey. While 88% of respondents were confident in their IT environments' resilience to external pressures, only 11% expressed vulnerability. Partnerships with Huawei and BNI conducted the survey, highlighting challenges around skills, complexity, standardisation, and supporting emerging workloads.

The focus is shifting towards managing increasingly complex environments as technology improves. Only 11% of respondents expressed low confidence in handling disruptions or shortages. Resilience now involves managing distributed infrastructures across on-premises, private and public clouds, which increases complexity. Most organisations (89%) believe their core IT environment can continue operating without significant financial or reputational impact if disrupted, but 11% had low confidence.

48% of respondents were partially ready to handle rapid data growth and AI-driven workloads, while 35% were fully ready. However, 14% were not ready and would require significant investment. Campus networks provide a solid foundation for modern workplaces, with 78% of respondents reporting reliable support for services like WiFi, video conferencing, voice, CCTV and access control.

However, 11% reported inconsistent performance, while 8% had separate management for these services. Standardisation of network design and management between headquarters and branch locations is crucial, with 40% fully standardised and 37% mostly standardised. Inconsistent network architectures can slow the deployment of new applications, increase support and maintenance costs, and make it harder to enforce security policies.