Cloud Hosting & Maintenance

Cloud services in Cameroon need a different plan from the one in a vendor brochure. Bandwidth can be expensive, connections drop, power cuts are part of daily life in many neighbourhoods, and some organisations want certain data kept on their own premises. Opesware designs hosting and cloud set-ups that take those realities into account, so your school, clinic, shop or head office keeps working when the internet or the electricity does not, and catches up automatically when they return.

We work with major cloud providers and with managed hosting and VPS, and we are just as willing to recommend a well-maintained local server when that is the better fit. Each client is different: a single-site business with a good fibre connection, a group of clinics spread across several regions and an NGO reporting to donors abroad will each need a different balance between local equipment, cloud services and the people who look after them.

• Cloud-hosted: websites, client portals, mobile app back-ends and systems used from several towns. Staff connect from anywhere and there is no server to maintain on site.
• Local server: sites with weak or costly internet where the whole team works in one building, such as a hospital using OPES Health systems or a school campus. Data stays on premises and work continues during outages.
• Hybrid: software runs locally and synchronises with the cloud whenever the connection allows, giving head office a consolidated view and an off-site copy of the data. This is often the right answer for multi-branch retailers using CEMAC POS or groups of schools on the School Management System.

We compare the options with you on running costs, connectivity, data sensitivity and who will look after the system day to day. The answer can change over time, so we keep the design flexible enough to move a workload later without rewriting the software.

1. Assessment: an inventory of your servers, applications, data volumes and dependencies, and what each costs today.
2. Plan: target architecture, security settings, backup policy and a migration schedule that avoids month-end closing, exams or your busiest trading days.
3. Migration: data moved and verified, users switched over, the old system kept available until everyone is satisfied.
4. Backups: automatic copies kept in more than one location, with regular test restores, because a backup that has never been restored cannot be trusted.
5. Maintenance: monitoring, security patches, SSL renewals, disk and performance checks, and clear reporting under an annual maintenance contract.

We do not promise uptime figures we do not control. What we commit to is a design without obvious single points of failure, monitoring that alerts us to problems early, tested backups and a documented recovery procedure.

Cloud accounts are opened in your company’s name, with two-factor authentication, separate administrator accounts and access limited by role. We set budget alerts so that costs billed in foreign currency do not drift unnoticed, switch off resources you no longer use, and review the bill with you. On site, we can advise on UPS, inverters and network equipment so that local servers shut down cleanly and restart properly after a power cut; see our networking service.

Support comes from our team in Douala, in English or French, during business hours, with on-site visits in Douala and remote assistance and scheduled visits elsewhere in Cameroon and the CEMAC region. Read our guide to cloud and networking infrastructure in Cameroon, see business email, domain and hosting, or ask for a cloud assessment.