German tech startup CloudRadar launches new data center in Johannesburg, South Africa
German tech startup CloudRadar is launching its cloud-based IT-monitoring service in South Africa, ahead of further global expansion, to help ensure IT stability for regional businesses in the face of rapid, pandemic-fuelled digitisation.
The company, which is backed by one of Germany’s largest state-funded venture capital initiatives and more than 20 tech investors, has set up a data centre in Johannesburg, to allow for minimal monitoring latency for African businesses.
CloudRadar is a monitoring solution used by entrepreneurs, managers and IT systems administrators to detect and prevent IT network issues in real-time so that they can keep their organisations up and running at all times.
CloudRadar Managing Director Nicholas Thiede, who is based in Cape Town, said the company has set up a team in South Africa, and its new South African data centre was the company’s eighth around the world.
''Given the importance of the African continent for global IT growth, with South Africa being the main driver of that growth, it is important for us to have a strong base in South Africa. We believe in South Africa’s economic potential and we already see a lot of traction from businesses of all sizes in the region that understand the need for IT reliability. The recent months strongly proved that IT infrastructure stability is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s integral to all business operations, no matter which industry,'' he said.
Founded in Germany in 2016, CloudRadar is taking on the global market in order to make network and server monitoring more accessible and affordable for businesses or organisations across the globe. While large markets like the US, Europe and Australia lead the path, emerging and frontier markets are an important part of their footprint, already serving 64 countries.
Founder and CEO Thorsten Kramm, a seasoned IT infrastructure monitoring expert from Berlin, said the Covid-19 pandemic had shown the crucial role of IT reliability in how organisations were able to react to external challenges. Those who had their IT stack under control were much more able to cope. IT systems failures cost the average business up to $10 000 for every hour of downtime. Large corporations, in turn, can lose more than $100 000 an hour to IT infrastructure failures, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).
''Monitoring has been around for a while, and there are several on-premise and cloud-based SaaS solutions in the market. However, those tools are too complex and expensive for regular businesses and organisations, who need a simple, user-friendly, inexpensive and reliable plug-and-play solution. We built CloudRadar as a complete solution, with reliable best-practice configurations baked into the design - it is state-of-the-art, radically simple and ultra user-friendly,'' he said.
Kramm who designed CloudRadar for use by those responsible for the IT setups of regular businesses, said: ''In the same way that Office 365 simplifies business collaboration or Slack simplifies team communication, CloudRadar makes it incredibly simple and affordable for anyone to monitor all their servers, network devices and websites. It takes less than 30 minutes to fully configure and our solution costs only $1.70 (R33.00) per host, which is significantly less than other IT monitoring solutions. Another benefit is our pay-as-you-go pricing without any contractual lock-ins, which I see resonates very well with budget-cautious South Africans.''
Kramm concluded: ''Downtime is detrimental to any organisation, and without monitoring, it’s hard to identify problems quickly. Having worked in the IT infrastructure monitoring space for more than two decades, I have seen too often what a terrible blow downtime can be for businesses, let alone the stress it puts on the IT teams. That is why I am determined to make monitoring universally accessible. In a world that runs on IT, IT reliability is a must, and we are here to make that reality.''
