Intelligent Data Centres Issue 06 | Page 38

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. 38 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