Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 53 | Page 76

t cht lk data sovereignty and security issues, which have been the main stumbling blocks in the past, are no longer a concern. We are facing exciting times with the advent of all these public providers. Do these announcements sound the death knell for traditional hardware solution providers? No doubt analysts will be keeping a close eye on hardware sales in the next two to five years. I recently returned from Las Vegas where there was a large public cloud provider conference of more than 60,000 delegates and I was thoroughly and pleasantly surprised at the content and mindset of providers, customers and partners. One thing is clear – we are at an infliction point in IT. Any CXO returning from this event would have many questions about their IT services and I suppose their first priority would be to halt all procurement. Why would you want to incur huge costs to own and maintain your own data centre, besides the operational and security challenges that go with it? The advantages of public cloud services have been well Claude Schuck, Regional Manager, Middle East at Veeam “ AS BOTH PUBLIC AND PRIVATE CLOUD CONTINUE TO MATURE IN THE REGION, MANY COMPANIES WILL OPT FOR BOTH, LEVERAGING MULTIPLE CLOUDS TO SATISFY THEIR DIVERSE ENTERPRISE COMPUTING NEEDS. documented. But the answer is not that simple. As both public and private cloud continue to mature in the region, many companies will opt for both, leveraging multiple clouds to satisfy their diverse enterprise computing needs. Multi-cloud combines on-premise operations with services and applications running on multiple cloud providers, which enables organisations to capture the benefits of each platform while mitigating their downsides. In this heterogeneous environment, the main challenge now is managing the distributed data between all the clouds and centralising this management to ensure visibility regardless of where the data is residing. The 2019 Veeam Cloud Data Management report surveyed over 1,500 business leaders globally and found that organisations are on a journey to become a more intelligent business, meaning they are leveraging technologies such as Cloud Data Management and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create a real-time view of the collective business and the ability to act intelligently on that insight. Among the businesses on this journey, the study highlights four common components globally: 1. Cloud: Cloud Data Management is a key component of delivering intelligent data management. Three-quarters of companies report using Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS) platforms. Many are utilising the cloud for their backup and recovery services, with 51% using Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and 44% using Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS). It is evident that leaders are recognising the advantages of a multi-cloud and hybrid-based approach, citing cost, reliability, flexibility and data security of the cloud as their main reasons for choosing it. 2. Capabilities: Organisations must enhance their capabilities, to ensure employees can draw on data insights and use new technologies as they are deployed, with nine out of 10 businesses viewing upskilling employees’ digital skills as vital to their digital success. 3. Culture: Creating a culture that is adaptable and receptive to new technologies so that people can evolve 76 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com