FEATURE expanding hardware capacity. Before investing in additional GPUs, CIOs need to establish whether existing resources are being fully utilised, whether workloads are experiencing bottlenecks and whether performance problems originate within their own infrastructure or external model providers.
Observability is becoming increasingly important in this environment, helping organisations connect infrastructure performance with application outcomes and identify opportunities to improve efficiency.
Sovereignty moves beyond data residency
Data sovereignty has emerged as a defining consideration in Middle East cloud strategies, particularly as governments accelerate national AI programmes and expand digital infrastructure investments.
For organisations operating in regulated sectors, infrastructure decisions must account for where information is stored, who can access it and which legal and regulatory requirements apply.
Migally said sovereignty is becoming particularly important across government, financial services, healthcare and critical infrastructure.
“ However, sovereignty today is about more than location. It is about maintaining control, visibility and governance over data throughout its lifecycle,” he said.
As AI adoption expands, organisations must also understand how information is collected, processed and used by increasingly autonomous applications.
Abousaleh similarly emphasised that local hosting alone does not guarantee compliance.
Enterprises must classify information and workloads, evaluate cross-border data transfers and apply appropriate controls to individual applications.
He believes observability should form part of sovereignty strategies from the outset, allowing organisations to monitor activity, investigate potential issues and identify changes that could undermine regulatory compliance.
These considerations are encouraging enterprises to adopt architectures that combine locally hosted infrastructure for sensitive workloads with public cloud services where appropriate.
The challenge is achieving that balance without creating isolated environments that restrict innovation or introduce unnecessary operational complexity.
The next phase of enterprise cloud will be defined less by the volume of infrastructure migrated and more by how effectively organisations manage workloads, data and costs across increasingly diverse environments.
For Middle East enterprises, the opportunity lies in combining the scalability of public cloud with the control of private infrastructure, while developing the governance and resilience needed to support AI-driven business models. • www. intelligentcio. com
INTELLIGENT CIO MIDDLE EAST
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