VIEW
POINT
BUZZ
Vo l u m e 3
Issue 7
Vo l u m e 3
VIEW
POINT
BUZZ
Issue 7
W
hile cloud deployment
in the Middle East and
North Africa (MENA)
is not as widespread
and
advanced
as
it is in some other countries, the massive
infrastructure development in the region is
giving cloud projects a long-awaited and
well-deserved boost. IDC estimates that
MENA presents a $2.2 billion opportunity
to cloud vendors, a number projected to
increase 24 percent on an annual basis. It’ll
hit $5 billion by 2022.
In February, 2019, Oracle opened its regional
datacenter in Abu Dhabi. A few months later,
Microsoft launched datacenters in Dubai
and Abu Dhabi. AWS has also committed
to having its first datacenter in Bahrain this
16
year. This is the macro view. On a micro
level, we are seeing several cloud security
trends converge in 2019.
Cloud security trends in the
Middle East
First, as cloud services including SaaS, PaaS,
and IaaS now play increasingly critical roles
in enterprise infrastructure, the hybrid cloud
formula continues to grow. As companies
transition to the cloud, they’re inevitably
operating in a hybrid cloud environment,
with some data in the cloud and some still in
the on-premise servers. This hybrid model
allows companies to take advantage of the
high availability and scalability of cloud,
and retain the old comfort of having on-
premise servers. This means enterprises
now need to have a security strategy that
straddles and protects both environments at
the same time.
CISO MAG | July-August 2019
CISO MAG | July-August 2019
17