G4S Africa, with over 111 000 employees in 29 African countries, joins a fast growing group of multinational organisations which have switched to cloud computing services in a bid to accelerate growth and improve reliability. Over five million businesses worldwide have already gone Google and many organisations are moving their IT hosting to the cloud to empower their workforce, expand into new markets and increase the overall efficiency of service delivery.
As part of the agreement, Grove will support and deploy services to 15 G4S country operations, of which 11 will be done on site and three remotely. The Grove solution for G4S Africa will include the latest technology and a full service tailored to G4S that requires minimal client resources to support and manage.
According to G4S Africa's regional finance director, Barry Doran, there was more than one compelling reason to switch to cloud computing services, but the main reason for moving was improving the reliability and uptime of their existing hosted mail systems. "In our corporate values we emphasise quality in the delivery of security and safety solutions to our clients, wherever they are in Africa, and cloud computing provides us with the freedom to focus on these core competencies without being held back by unreliable systems. Google Apps has a 99.9% availability SLA guarantee with zero scheduled down-time," Doran said.
"It was also a question of cost. The solution offered to us by Grove cut our IT bill in half while offering more value than we have at present. The decision to switch was therefore an easy one to make and with many shared values between the two companies, we believe that Grove is the perfect partner for us in this regard."
Pip Witheridge, Grove's CEO, said he was thrilled by this latest opportunity. "There are so many ways that our cloud computing solution will improve G4S's systems and processes, we expect to see a dramatic difference in their service delivery almost immediately."
