THE EDGE
GARTNER HAS
FORECASTED
THAT MIDDLE
EAST AND NORTH
AFRICA SPENDING
ON PUBLIC
CLOUD SERVICES
INCLUDING
SOFTWARE,
INFRASTRUCTURE,
PLATFORMS AND
SECURITY, WILL
CROSS THE US$2
BILLION MARK
BY 2020.
s a region, the Middle East has
its own set of compliances
and privacy requirements.
One of the very stringent
requirements is to keep its government,
mission critical, public sector data
resident within its areas of jurisdiction. For
this reason, in the last few years a number
of cloud and infrastructure vendors
have initiated roll outs to host their local
editions in the region.
A
Gartner has forecasted that Middle East
and North Africa spending on public cloud
services including software, infrastructure,
platforms and security, will cross the US$2
billion mark by 2020.
Overall, the adoption, usage and spending
on public cloud has seen a consistent
double-digit growth in almost every region
of the world. The primary reason for this
is the switch-over from an asset-based
capital expenditure model for IT spending
to an operating expenditure, pay-as-you-
use model, that is provided by a public
cloud type of consumption service. This
reduces the burden of having a high initial
expenditure outlay and a software vendor-
based lock-in. The consumerisation of
IT, which is so much a part of the public
cloud platform, continues to be an
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
enabler for the double-digit growth of
IT spending on this platform. On the flip
side, it has opened the gates for a large
number of users to come on board and
use the platform. While the number of
cloud-enabled users will definitely boost
collaboration and workflow inside an
organisation, it exposes a wider segment
of executives to the vagaries of an
external environment. organisations must have the complete
copy of their cloud data accessible to
themselves in the event of a wide-spread
operational failure or unexpected litigation
or force majeure of any sort. Recent global
outages involving large cloud service
providers, like the recent Google outage,
have led consultants to point out that
losses from such prolonged incidents
could run into tens of billions of dollars.
Irrespective of the service level
agreements of uptime provided by
the cloud service providers, business Migration of an organisation’s employees
to cloud platforms has meant they now
have access to data stored on the cloud.
Irrespective of how well security policies
have been mapped into cloud application
platforms, accidental deletion or malicious
deletion of data by users is another
unpredictable possibility for the loss of
data in the cloud.
Simon Hwang, APAC President
from Synology
Consulting company, Aberdeen Group,
points out that the most common
reason for data loss in the public cloud,
is end-user deletion, even when multiple
confirmation steps are required. While
such incidents are definitely not frequent,
when they do occur, the financial losses
could be devastating. In other words, the
cloud platform does not offer a fool-
proof plan for data protection unless
organisations actively build such a plan.
Issue 06
69