EDITOR’S QUESTION
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.
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 players 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.
T
he 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 office buildings, so too are they now looking to rent virtual
real estate in the form of cloud-based offerings. 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-added services to their customers directly from
their own marketplaces.
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. 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.
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
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INTELLIGENTCIO
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 currently 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.
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