With cloud adoption rates escalating worldwide, Intelligent CIO spoke to Rawad Zaki, Regional Manager Saudi Arabia and Levant, about the current situation in the Middle East. We also asked him about advice for CIOs considering moving their data to the cloud.
Can you tell me what the latest is in the Middle East in terms of cloud adoption?
As we know cloud is available in the whole world and the growth in terms of cloud adoption is really huge. According to statistics I think IDC mention that 90% of organisations will be moving in the next three years to adopt a multi cloud strategy.
However, when it comes to the Middle East the ratio will go down to about 50% so there are still some restrictions mainly in the government sector. In order to solve this issue a lot of public cloud providers like Azure and Amazon are building data centres in these regions. If you look to see what happened in Bahrain, AWS and Amazon built a huge data centre and we are hearing about other data centres that will be adopted soon.
And the other option for big governments like Saudi Arabia, following the vision of 2030, is they are going to do it by relying on these technologies like Amazon and AWS. They are going to build on- prem public cloud. For Saudi Arabia the two main providers of public cloud will be the National Information Centre and STC. So all of the government entities will be relying on these cloud providers and we are expecting in the next three years real growth in terms of cloud adoption.
Plus the software as a service business is really growing. This shows you how eager customers are to adopt all of the cloud services. This will help them release some of their time and resources as they rely more and more on the services from these cloud providers.
The whole Middle East, by the way, had growth of 50% in terms of Veeam cloud provider transactions year-over-year. This is a huge growth and shows you how much customers are willing to adopt a multi cloud strategy.
Are customers in the Middle East seeking help with cloud mobility?
If we look to q1 results for Veeam globally year over year growth was 60%, in the Middle East it was 24%. In terms of Veeam cloud service providers the growth was 50%, while globally it is 31%. So the growth in the Middle East is really huge and this gives you a hint about how the customers in the Middle East region are behaving now. As long as there are technologies that are capable of supporting them to deliver the availability and cloud mobility between multi clouds then they are all going to adopt more and Veeam is definitely the clear leader in terms of data management.
You will find workloads running on multiple-clouds. The main question is how will you find ways to backup and protect these workloads and secondly you need to ask how you are going to manage this data across these clouds and how you can leverage data in these different locations. With Veeam Availability Console it will give you these capabilities so you can protect any workload that is residing in any data centre – whether it’s on-prem or any cloud.
Plus you can move your data easily and simply with one licence from one cloud to another cloud. This is very simple without any additional cost or downtime.
What advice would you give to a CIO in the Middle East who was looking to protect their data in the cloud?
One of the main aims of CIOs is to move to the cloud but they have to be ready before moving because the cloud will solve many issues but it will create other issues if you are not ready for it.
If you don’t understand where the line is between the cloud provider’s responsibility and the customer’s responsibility there will be problems.
Veeam by its cloud availability platform it will definitely help the customer to ensure that the service will be up and running all the time in case of any downtime or a ransomware attack. Any issue and Veeam will be instantly restoring the issue back to production.
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