• 68% of respondents cited flexibility and significant cost savings they expect from implementing a hybrid cloud strategy while 56% view cloud as useful for conducting testing and development before moving their business-critical workloads to a production environment.

C-Suite executives in the UAE are prioritising the implementation of hybrid cloud strategies to help their organisations benefit from flexibility, cost savings, testing and development, as well as disaster recovery.

A new IBM study conducted by research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) revealed that 85 per cent of them are pursuing or planning to implement hybrid cloud strategies in the next 12 months.

However, while there is a growing shift towards the cloud, further adoption of hybrid cloud strategies are needed to help organizations transform their operations using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).

The new study polled over 500 C-Suite executives across 12 industry sectors, including highly regulated industries, such as government, telecommunication and banking, in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and South Africa.

The study revealed that even though only 32 per cent of the executives surveyed from the UAE are currently pursuing hybrid cloud strategies, over 50 per cent are in the planning phase.

Digital transformation

“68 per cent cited flexibility and significant cost savings they expect from implementing a hybrid cloud strategy while 56 per cent view cloud as useful for conducting testing and development before moving their business-critical workloads to a production environment,” it said.

“It is evident that hybrid cloud strategies are becoming core to digital transformation journeys and increasingly prioritised in the UAE to help revolutionise business models,” Hossam Seif El-Din, General Manager of IBM in the Middle East and Pakistan, said.

Moreover, he said that IBM is working with its customers in the UAE and across the globe to accelerate their hybrid cloud efforts and prepare them for transformational technologies like AI.

As organisations in the UAE transform their operations, he said that hybrid cloud will continue to be adopted to provide flexibility and efficiencies and improve the bottom line.

65 per cent of the  C-Suite executives polled cited the ease of application deployment in adopting hybrid cloud in their organisations, 58 per cent want to leverage the operational benefits, and 55 per cent believe the technology will aid resource allocation improvements.

Growing prominence

In the UAE, several companies from various industries have adapted their corporate structure to hybrid cloud.

The hybrid cloud model’s growing prominence stems from its agile architecture, which allows businesses to manage multiple clouds designated to meet current and incremental business requirements, data, and workloads in a secured and governed manner.

The study highlights the evolution of a hybrid cloud ecosystem in which organisations would choose a deployment option (private cloud, public cloud, or on-premise) depending upon the value of that deployment option. Vendors that offer flexibility to seamlessly operate across multiple clouds will have an edge over others, Harish Dunakhe, IDC’s Research Director for Software and Cloud in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa, said.

 “It is clear that there is a strong awareness of the benefits that organisations can leverage from the hybrid cloud. As the awareness grows, we expect enterprises to encourage adoption across their organisations to fully benefit from hybrid cloud programs,” he said.