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EDITOR’S QUESTION
CHARBEL KHNEISSER, REGIONAL
PRESALES DIRECTOR, EMEA EMERGING
MARKETS AT RIVERBED
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.
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.
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 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.
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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.
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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.
“
WHILE THE CLOUD
MARKET IN THE
MIDDLE EAST
IS RELATIVELY
NASCENT, IT
IS RAPIDLY
GROWING AND
ADOPTION IS
CONSTANTLY ON
THE RISE.
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.
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.
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. n
INTELLIGENTCIO
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