REGIONAL CHANNELS
Zain Kuwait offers cloud
disaster recovery services
(Left to right) Eaman Al Roudhan is Chief Executive Officer at Zain Kuwait; and Amr Refaat is General Manager for IBM Middle East and Pakistan.
The high incidence of security threats, as well as the adoption of digital transformation in the
region, is driving enterprises to consider cloud-based disaster recovery and business continuity
services. By Arun Shankar.
T
he Zain Kuwait
telecommunications company
and IBM have announced their
collaboration to launch a new cloud-
based disaster recovery service that
will provide IBM and Zain’s enterprise
customers with business continuity
capabilities and disaster recovery of their
critical IT systems, without incurring
the infrastructure expense of a second
physical site. Through the new service,
customers will benefit from the added
flexibility of keeping their data in-
country on IBM Cloud. According to
MarketsandMarkets, the market size
of disaster recovery as a service in the
Middle East is estimated at $101 million
and is expected to see a compound
annual growth rate of 44.8 per cent
through to 2021. The Middle East region
is experiencing a significant increase in
DRaaS adoption due to the increasing
number of cyberattacks and other data
threats like security breaches, software
and hardware failures, and power outages.
According to Gartner, the market
size for cloud management and security
services in the Middle East and North
Africa is expected to grow from $130
million in 2017 to $226 million in 2020.
Enterprises in the Middle East and North
Africa are the targets of some of the
world’s most advanced attacks, as well as
the highest rate of attacks. Organisations
are trying to increase detection, blocking
and advanced defences while being
faced with limited availability in the
security workforce. Large organisations
in the Middle East and North Africa
continue to invest in building out security
operations capabilities either in-house or
by leveraging external services offered by
managed security services providers.
Middle East and North Africa spending
on information security technology and
21