THE EDGE
he advent of cloud, scale
and hosted pay-as-you-grow
services are finally upon
us. The two major cloud
providers, Microsoft Azure and Amazon
Web Services (AWS) have put down large
investments and opened data centres in
the Middle East.
T
In June this year, Microsoft brought
online two United Arab Emirates (UAE)
regions – in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, enabling
government agencies and businesses to
comply with local regulations by providing
data residency in the UAE for its Azure and
Office 365 services. A little over a month
later at the end of July, AWS announced
the expansion of its global footprint with
the opening of the AWS Middle East
(Bahrain) Region. The announcement
stated that ‘developers, start-ups and
enterprises, as well as government,
education and non-profit organisations
can start using the new AWS Middle East
Region to run applications and serve end-
users across the Middle East.’
We are facing exciting times ahead with the
launch of these public cloud providers in the
Middle East, which will undoubtedly provide
an impetus for regional companies to
better integrate cloud into their strategies.
Organisations will be more comfortable
with consuming these services now that
THE ADVENT OF
CLOUD, SCALE
AND HOSTED
PAY-AS-YOU-
GROW SERVICES
ARE FINALLY
UPON US.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
data sovereignty and security issues, which
have been the main stumbling blocks in the
past, are no longer a concern. We are facing
exciting times with the advent of all these
public providers.
Do these announcements sound the death
knell for traditional hardware solution
providers? No doubt analysts will be
keeping a close eye on hardware sales in
the next two to five years.
I recently returned from Las Vegas where
there was a large public cloud provider
conference of more than 60,000 delegates
and I was thoroughly and pleasantly
surprised at the content and mindset of
providers, customers and partners.
One thing is clear – we are at an inflection
point in IT. Any CXO returning from this
event would have many questions about
their IT services and I suppose their first
priority would be to halt all procurement.
Why would you want to incur huge
costs to own and maintain your own
data centre, besides the operational
and security challenges that go with it?
The advantages of public cloud services
have been well documented. But the
answer is not that simple. As both public
and private cloud continue to mature
in the region, many companies will opt
for both, leveraging multiple clouds to
satisfy their diverse enterprise computing
needs. Multi-cloud combines on-premise
operations with services and applications
running on multiple cloud providers, which
enables organisations to capture the
benefits of each platform while mitigating
their downsides.
In this heterogeneous environment, the
main challenge now is managing the
distributed data between all the clouds
and centralising this management to
ensure visibility regardless of where the
data is residing.
WE ARE FACING
EXCITING TIMES
AHEAD WITH
THE LAUNCH
OF THESE
PUBLIC CLOUD
PROVIDERS
IN THE
MIDDLE EAST.
The 2019 Veeam Cloud Data
Management report surveyed over 1,500
business leaders globally and found that
organisations are on a journey to become
a more intelligent business, meaning
they are leveraging technologies such as
Cloud Data Management and Artificial
Intelligence (AI) to create a real-time
view of the collective business and the
ability to act intelligently on that insight.
Amongst the businesses on this journey,
the study highlights four common
components globally:
1. Cloud: Cloud Data Management
is a key component of delivering
intelligent data management.
Three-quarters of companies report
using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
platforms. Many are utilising the
cloud for their backup and recovery
services, with 51% using Backup-as-a-
Service (BaaS) and 44% using Disaster
Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS). It is
evident that leaders are recognising the
advantages of a multi-cloud and hybrid-
based approach, citing cost, reliability,
flexibility and data security of the cloud
as their main reasons for choosing it.
2. Capabilities: Organisations
must enhance their capabilities, to
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