Royal Eswatini Sugar is an agro
processing company in Eswatini.
We grow sugarcane on 30 000 hectares of land.
We process that sugar cane into two
main products at the moment.
We process it into sugar,
refined sugar and VHP or brown sugar and we
produce potable ethanol, which in turn
goes into alcoholic drinks or vinegar.
I came involved with Eswatini Sugar because
of the role I play within Dimension Data.
My role is a licensing specialist,
so the goal is to be a liaison on between Microsoft,
which is the vendor as well as
Dimension Data as well as the client.
So I also make sure that from a compliance
perspective, they're on the right agreements
and they have the right technology
and products that they're using.
The main reasons why
RES decided to move to on-prem technology
as opposed to cloud offerings.
It's because of the feeling at the time
the company was not very enthusiastic
in terms of moving to Cloud.
Also because of our geographical location
with our internet infrastructure not being
at its best.
So prior to the Office 365 rollout,
our meetings used to be physical.
We used to drive 17 km across the estate
between our two main buildings and
have meetings, have physical meetings.
Sometimes we have to drive across
the state a couple of times a day.
The collaboration was nonexistent.
Due to the pandemic, started last year in March.
Dimension Data has done several of solution
assessment to assess the situation and help
Royal Eswatini Sugar
to securely work remotely.
We were very pleased that we
moved ahead technically that we
put the platform in place for the business
to use because that really allowed us to move
to remote work when COVID-19 came.
And the M365 products brought
in that level of efficiency within the business
and the users were so happy to engage and adopt.
Royal Eswatini is aspiring to achieve more
collaboration, productivity and maintain
security within the organization.
To accomplish that holistic innovative solution,
they handle sensitive information and highly
confidential data on a daily basis and its core
business and leads to major security needs.
One of the major benefits that has risen from the Office 365
is the improved security.
We've been able to apply policies much easier across the organization.
Policies around Outlook in our email,
policies around our documents, policies around classification
to be much easier to enforce through
Office 365 and that improved security
in today's cyber world is a great
benefit to us as a business.
Royal Swatini Sugar has a future technology
transformation roadmap for the next five
years and actually currently we are working
with the leadership team to broaden our scope
at Royal Eswatini Corp and this is across
the business and technical work streams.
Working with the Royal Eswatini Sugar
team has been a pleasure.
They're very focused, they're driven,
they have a plan in place and for us it's
to enable them to achieve what they're trying
to get, where they're trying to go to.
And I think that's been awesome
for me and all of them
they're great to work with.
Special mention should go to Dimension Data,
our license partner. We've been working
with Dimension Data for a long time now
and the relationship has grown over the years.
I think people get afraid of the cloud
and afraid of change and really with
a partner with Dimension data.
It really was just very easy.
We phoned them up and
we said we want so many licenses.
I think it took us a few
days and we had our licenses.
We then were able to rollout very effeciently.
The systems are all there.
It was technically a very
easy rollout initially.