Intelligent Data Centres Issue 06 | Page 35

FEATURE Cloud computing offers numerous business benefits but its popularity has had a clear impact on the traditional on-premise data centre. We hear from experts at Pure Storage and Riverbed about the impact of cloud and how businesses can best prepare for a hybrid IT infrastructure. Y Your optimal route to hybrid IT infrastructure – educated, planned and strategic Assaad El Saadi, Regional Director, Middle East, Pure Storage Today’s most evolved enterprises know the potential of their data as a competitive lever and for insights into their customers. They also know that not all data is created equal. To build the most modern IT environments and derive the maximum value, there is a growing acknowledgment that data types have different needs for access, storage and management. www.intelligentdatacentres.com In the Middle East, there has been a growing movement towards the adoption of hybrid IT environments, where workloads and services are split across cloud and non-cloud environments such as on-premises hardware, private cloud, co-located cloud and public cloud. According to IDC, public cloud spend in the UAE alone is set to soar from around US$119.6m in 2017 to US$411.4m in 2022. When a market more than triples in value in a five-year period, we should take notice. But challenges persist, especially in the Storage-as-a-Service domain. Many third-party providers of this increasingly popular hybrid cloud offering have not managed to catch up with more stringent requirements when it comes to enterprise class-deployments. Issue 06 35