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Subsea cable connectivity: The key to accelerating digital transformation
SUBSEA CABLE CONNECTIVITY IS THE KEY TO ACCELERATING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN AFRICA. GOOGLE RECENTLY LAUNCHED ITS $1-BILLION EQUIANO CABLE, A CONNECTION BETWEEN WESTERN EUROPE AND SOUTH AFRICA.
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this announcement also coincides with Meta-backed 2Africa, the world’s longest subsea cable which is expected to come online in 2024.
The Equiano 144Tbps, 12 fibre pair cable will ensure faster internet speeds and reduced internet prices when it is switched on before the end of the year. It will be Africa’s highest capacity cable and stretches more than 15000 kilometres from Portugal to South Africa. Subsea cable connectivity will help governments throughout Africa achieve their digital transformation goals and objectives. In South Africa, it will contribute considerably to Government’s NDP2030 and SA Connect strategies.
Infrastructure development and digital and socio-economic transformation were the key topics at the 2022 GovTech conference, the annual meeting platform for representatives from government and industry to connect in serving citizens to better use information and communications technologies.
Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, the Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies, promised that Government was committed to delivering on broadband objectives as key enablers for the delivery of an economic step change for South Africa.
BY MATONE DITLHAKE, CORRIDOR AFRICA TECHNOLOGIES CEO
Corridor Africa Technologies (Pty) Ltd is a leading and innovative smart technology and solutions provider. We are driven by a sound commitment to digitalization, ongoing innovation, excellence and open collaboration.
We deliver excellence in Smart Technologies across multiple disciplines in Digital Advisory, Telecoms Infrastructure Solutions and Smart Building Solutions. Corridor Africa Technologies is able to deliver complete end-to-end solutions through ample experience, sheer brilliance and strategic leverage.
Government is implementing a broadband connectivity drive through SA Connect and its goal is to ensure that all South Africans have access to the internet. According to Google, the Equiano subsea cable will lead to the creation of 1.6 million jobs and it expects data prices to drop by at least 20 percent.
Through SA Connect, Government plans to connect over 400 sites in the Eastern Cape and the Northern Cape and then provide internet access for everyone across the country in phase two. This programme aims to connect over 33 000 community Wi-Fi hotspots over three years. Ntshavheni recently said a revised model for SA Connect would include a partnership with ISPs, access network service providers, and mobile virtual network operators in the SME space. She referred to this collaboration as part of Government’s commitment to the transformation of the telecoms industry.
Digital transformation involves the ongoing application of the latest technology to improve a government’s performance and help meet the expectations of its citizens. There is no doubt it is important, digital transformation offers many solutions to e-Government services as it addresses most of the challenges in e-Government. It is clear that the Government has put policies in place to support digital transformation and with advances in infrastructure and digital technologies, it might successfully address its challenges to realise its global digital strategy successfully.
South African Government is certainly lagging behind with digital transformation in realising its goal for e-Government. It needs to work in close cooperation with stakeholders to achieve e-Government through digital transformation. Citizens will be seeing more and more of this digital transformation over the next few years.
Includes Router
Live your Monate
SOCIAL INVESTMENT FUND MANAGEMENT AND ADVISORY FIRM TSHIKULULU SOCIAL INVESTMENTS HAS PARTNERED WITH LORGE TO AUTOMATE AND STREAMLINE ITS FINANCIAL PROCESSES. THE COMPANY IS ALREADY PROFITING FROM AUTOMATION, IT MANAGED TO RECOVER THE COSTS OF ITS INITIAL PROJECT WITHIN A FEW MONTHS.
uplicate capturing was their
Dbiggest challenge. Tshikululu was running various systems that weren’t integrated and the data needed to be captured manually across these systems. They had to capture everything in their external system and then accountants had to recapture all that information into
Sage 300.
Tshikululu Social Investments CFO Alistair Wagner says they partnered with Lorge to standardise and automate our management accounts across all our clients. “Firstly, we looked at a new system for our back office that integrates with Sage 300. We then started off by automating our payments, this was a small part of the process, but the impact was significant.”
He says they managed to recover the costs of the initial project within months. “The time it takes to authorise and process a payment is now a fraction of what it used to be. Because all the systems are now integrated, the data is automatically shared across systems - the data resides in our core line of business system and none of it goes into Sage 300. The entire process is now automated,” he explains.
Lorge CEO Neville Govender says in today’s competitive business environment, companies like Tshikululu Social
Investments need to extract optimal value from their data and software. “Lorge understands the dynamics of automated processing. We help our clients to keep operating with precise, seamless and refined integration across a full spectrum of business processes.”
“That is why we provide financial services software to help businesses in credit union, banking, investment, insurance, brokerage, title and other financial services institutions to meet the challenges of today’s dynamic and competitive environment,” he adds.
Wagner comments: “Unlike the previous inefficient paper-based processes, automation enables us to track any payment at any stage of the process. The final step in the process is automating procurement by creating creditors.
“The system will then automatically create a creditor on approval of the invoice. Security controls have been built in to deal with duplicate payments etc. This will finalise the automation process and integration with the back office completely.”
“Biggest saving has been on people and time. Automation has made our business scalable, the volumes we are processing now in a fraction of the time is massive compared to what it used to be. If we hadn’t followed this route, we would have had to employ an army of people, there would have been many mistakes e.g., wrongful payments. These errors would also incur huge costs,” he explains.
Commenting on the partnership with Lorge, Wagner says: “Automating certain processes are complex, but the team at Lorge always managed to find a solution for any challenge. They understand our chart of accounts and our financial systems. Over a period of 24 years, we have solidified our partnership with Lorge, their support has been phenomenal, they are always there and always deliver.”
SMART GRIDS:
A SOLUTION TO POWER OUTAGES
any companies that rely on
Mmainframes are now migrating to modern cloud-based platforms in order to stay relevant and ultimately, to save costs.
However, one of the biggest challenges when migrating from any mainframe is moving transactional and master data. These large-scale migrations normally take longer than 18 months and given the scale and complexity of these projects, businesses have been slow to adopt these automated migration tools.
RECENT ADVANCES IN AUTOMATED TOOLS FOR MIGRATING LEGACY APPLICATIONS TO THE CLOUD HAVE ALTERED THE MAINFRAME MARKET.
Data migrations always seem simple on paper, but the reality is that 1:1 mappings end up becoming 1:n:1 mappings, with more exceptions than rules. The reasons behind this include the fact that modern enterprise systems, model data objects very differently to how mainframe systems were designed.
The fact is that many of these data migrations that are sold as being ‘automated’ end up being executed by teams of human data capturers and developers. They spend much more time on programming for the deviations in the data than the fields that can map 1:1.
Imagine if one could replace the team of human data capturers with a humanoid robot. It could be trained on exactly the same principles and exceptions that necessitated the use of humans over data migration programs in the first place.
DIGITAL WORKERS ARE THE SOLUTION
Well, it’s now possible with FIRtech’s Robotics as a Service (RaaS) solution. It’s an automation tool that makes this task almost effortless, a proven mainframe data migration and modernisation tool that helps companies mitigate their mainframe risks in the shortest possible time and with the least amount of risk.
The data migration robot uses front-end GUI’s to retrieve data from the mainframe and automatically migrate and capture the data into a new system. This removes any risks, where business rules that are built into the system GUI or terminal, are overwritten by the use of back-end scripts.
More importantly, it also ensures that exceptions are caught, fixed and recaptured before any data inconsistency is created in the new system. A single robot can work up to 24 times faster than a human and doesn’t need any rest or sleep. Effortless, errorless data migration in a matter of hours, not days or months.
RaaS provides business leaders with better access to the data captured in these legacy systems. Mainframe data, which contains many years of business transactions, can now be used to feed analytics or machine learning initiatives that can deliver competitive advantage.
By taking advantage of the multiple protocols and interfaces available on cloud services, they can unlock core business processes and data in their mainframe. Companies can now access mainframe data instantly, RaaS will help them move away from rigid monoliths and remove outdated interfaces and protocols.
Cloud is the future, it offers access to advanced analytics, AI, machine learning and data lakes. It also offers horizontal scalability with virtual unlimited capacity to increase scalability and elasticity.
BY FANIE BOTHA, FIRTECH COO
