Organisations in the Middle East should adopt innovative approaches to their storage needs in 2015 to survive an explosion in data generated by emerging technologies, say experts.
The public cloud services market in the Middle East and North Africa region (Mena) climbed 23 per cent this year to $629 million, up from $511m in 2013, according to preliminary estimates from market researcher Gartner.
Andrew Calthorpe, CEO of Condo Protego, a data storage and protection company, says: “With growth in third platform technologies – including cloud, big data and mobility – expected to accelerate in the Middle East this year, companies will need to adapt their storage strategies to keep up with demand.”
“Key trends in the region for 2015 will include more widespread adoption of hybrid public/private cloud models, a greater trend toward software-defined data centres, and acceleration in flash storage usage,” he says.
The Middle East and Africa will post the world’s highest cloud traffic growth rate, increasing more than eight-fold from 2013 to 2018, according to Cisco.
A hybrid cloud platform allows an organisation to retain control of business-critical data by building and managing its own virtualised IT platform and services, while using public cloud services for non-business critical data.
“Storage buying decisions are taking on increasing importance because you need your storage infrastructure to be more responsive and adaptable to rapidly changing demand,” says Calthorpe.
“Enterprises see cloud-based storage models as a good solution and we are seeing increasing demand for the hybrid approach – that allows IT managers to keep track of all their vital data while benefiting from the flexibility that the cloud model brings to their data centre needs,” he adds.
Increasing usage of social media, mobile devices, analytics and research and development is generating ever-higher volumes of increasingly complex data across a range of industries in the region.
As a result, the GCC’s big data market is set to grow almost five-fold, from $135.7m in 2013 to $635.5m by 2020, according to Frost & Sullivan.
To handle this increase in demand, organisations in the Middle East are increasingly adopting a software-defined data centre approach to their storage needs – virtualising infrastructure elements such as networking, storage, processing and security, and delivering them as a service.
This allows different devices to be adapted into a single infrastructure and boosts return on assets.
“IT organisations will need to learn to cope with ever-greater data volumes just to keep up with demand,” says Calthorpe. “Storage architectures need to become more dynamic, able to scale up – or down – rapidly, in response to business needs.
“We are seeing a shift away from traditional data centre models and towards the software-defined data centre approach, which allows you to make much better use of your available resources,” he adds.
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