FEATURE
Charbel Khneisser, Regional Presales
Director, EMEA Emerging Markets
at Riverbed
D
Data centre transformation
The data centre industry today is mirroring
the real estate business of the late-20th
century. Just as businesses drastically
scaled back their investments into
establishing their own offices buildings, so
too are they now looking to rent virtual real
estate in the form of cloud-based offerings.
This makes perfect sense from a cost
standpoint as the cloud offers the ability
to shift from intimidating capital expenses
to the more convenient OpEx model. There
is also the benefit of both upward and
downward scalability in line with business
requirements, so you only pay for what
you actually utilise.
For these reasons, while the cloud
market in the Middle East is relatively
nascent, it is rapidly growing and adoption
is constantly on the rise. Even large
enterprises that have already built their
own large-scale data centres are now
re-evaluating their investments. They,
along with the new breed of cloud-first
companies, are doubling down on cloud
investments as is especially evident from
the growing adoption of Solution-as-a-
Service (SaaS) offerings.
As a result, we can see that legacy data
centres are shrinking. However, given the
culture in the region – especially regarding
security, privacy and data confidentiality
– it is highly unlikely that these will
disappear altogether.
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Issue 06
Instead, we are seeing organisations
increasingly shift their front-end and
even their middleware services to cloud
platforms, while maintaining mission-
critical workloads and sensitive corporate
and customer data in their on-premise
data centres. These scaled-down data
centres do not compare to their traditional
counterparts in terms of storage and
processing capacity.
However, while these data centres
shrink, we are also seeing cloud providers
establish ever larger data centres. This is
already taking place, as today, major player
including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and others are all establishing their
cloud data centres in-region.
Because of how cloud services are
accessed from anywhere, at any time
and often from any device, there are
fundamental changes that must be
made in designing and provisioning
these data centres.
Irrespective of where applications and data
are hosted, end-user-experience must be
consistent as ultimately, this is the main
measure of success. Therefore, at Riverbed,
we are increasingly engaging with cloud
providers including Microsoft and AWS,
as well as with regional telecom service
providers, to help optimise the delivery and
performance of their cloud services.
Many of these providers themselves now
deploy our WAN-optimisation and end-
user-experience monitoring solutions.
This makes it possible for them to position
these market-leading solutions as value-
add services to their customers directly
from their own marketplaces.
There is no doubt that enterprises will
migrate more workloads to the cloud.
As they do so, many will opt for hybrid
deployments and scale back investment
into their own on-premise data centres.
Simultaneously, we will begin to see a new
breed of hyper-scale data centres being
established in the region by cloud providers.
As a result, while current market dynamics
will be greatly impacted by the cloud,
the outlook for providers of data centre
technologies – including storage, compute,
security, networking and more – certainly
remains positive. ◊
www.intelligentdatacentres.com