FINAL WORD
Data centres drive
Digital Transformation
in Middle East
Data centres are integral to the digitalisation efforts of
enterprises and organisations across the Middle East.
We hear from industry experts at Equinix MENA, Injazat
and eHosting DataFort, who tell us about some of the
challenges to the Middle East data centre industry,
as well as how data centres are enabling Digital
Transformation across the region.
R
esearch has revealed that the Middle East data
centre market is likely to grow at a CAGR of around
7% during the period 2018 to 2024. Among other
findings, Middle East Data Center Market – Investment
Analysis and Growth Opportunities 2019-2024 revealed
that the participation of government and individual
agencies has accelerated the digitisation trend in the
Middle East.
We spoke to three industry experts about the regional data
centre industry to find out more… Digital Transformation initiatives across the public
and private sector are driving the need to build state-
of-the-art data centres to support the transformation
journeys of enterprises. New technologies and business
transformation tools ranging from multi-cloud, Internet
of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence
(AI) to Machine Learning (ML) – all of which depend
on high-performance networks – are fundamentally
changing the way data is being produced, shared and
analysed, requiring a rethink in data centre strategy and
architecture, driving demand for local clouds.
How would you describe the data centre industry
in the region and do you have any predictions
for how this could change? Digital business leaders today are leveraging interconnection
to solve the complex integration and control challenges of
an increasingly distributed infrastructure.
Jeroen Schlosser, Managing Director, Equinix MENA Equinix’s second annual market study, the Global
Interconnection Index (GXI), concluded that
interconnection or direct and private traffic exchange
between key business partners is becoming the de facto
method for companies to operate in today's digital world.
The technology industry continues to expand at a rapid
pace and in order to support that, data centres need to
be one step ahead, providing the digital infrastructure
required to handle the data demands of the future.
According to Research and Market’s Data Centre
Construction Market in Middle East & Africa – Industry
Outlook and Forecast 2019 to 2024, the data centre
construction market in the Middle East and Africa is
expected to reach US$1billion during the forecast period.
The current trend of the world’s biggest technology firms
building data centres in the Middle East is a result of the
countries in the region diversifying their economies.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
If you take a more detailed look at how the design of
today’s interconnected IT is evolving then we see that due
to legislation, data security considerations in country and
network latency performance, some data sets and workloads
need to live in country, localised to those governments,
people and/or enterprises using it. On a regional level, we
are seeing that hyperscalers, network services providers and
general ICT providers are building a hub where these data
sets and applications are living and serving regional demand.
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