- UAE is the fastest-growing public cloud services market with an annual growth rate of 27.8%.
- Mandate to comply with government regulations around data residency and data privacy is one of the major factors driving the hybrid cloud model.
- Continuous investment in cloud datacentre space by hyperscalers has certainly accelerated the adoption of public cloud services in highly regulated sectors.
The total spending on public cloud services in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) has crossed $3.7 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 25.5 per cent over the next five years to reach $11.6 billion in 2025.
“South Africa, UAE and Saudi Arabia remain the three biggest markets within the region where UAE is the fastest-growing public cloud services market with an annual growth rate of 27.8 per cent,” Manish Ranjan, Program Manager for Software and Cloud at research firm IDC (META), told TechChannel News.
Moreover, he said that hybrid and multi-cloud ecosystems are evolving in the region, where both public and private cloud coexist with the traditional on-premise IT landscape.
“Mandate to comply with government regulations around data residency and data privacy is one of the major factors driving the hybrid cloud model in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META), “he said.
The continuous investment in cloud datacentre space by global cloud providers, he said has certainly accelerated the adoption of public cloud services in highly regulated sectors.
At the same time, he added that for organisations from other markets where there is no in-country cloud datacentre, hybrid cloud offers much more flexibility, and gives them a choice to use the cloud features as they like, while following the data governance of the country.
Hybrid cloud gaining traction
Given the importance of hybrid cloud, players like Microsoft, AWS and Oracle all have hybrid cloud offerings with Azure Stack, Outpost and Cloud@Customers respectively. These solutions take public cloud services and extend these into on-premises datacentres.
Some of the major benefits of a hybrid cloud are the greater flexibility of selecting the desired cloud model to ensure better security, and control over data.
“Organisations from highly regulated sectors such as banking and finance, healthcare and government are increasingly adopting a hybrid cloud model. This allows them to leverage public cloud functionalities in a private cloud deployment model by hosting on their on-premises hardware, following the mandate of cloud data governance,” he said.
IDC’s latest survey found that about 45 per cent of organisations across the region are planning to migrate a large proportion of workloads on both public and private clouds in a hybrid environment in the next couple of years.
Also, he said that nearly 40 per cent of the organisations claimed that they will be spending more in the hybrid cloud in the year 2021 as compared to 2020, while 45 per cent will continue to spend the same as planned last year. Hybrid and multi-cloud environments will become the foundational technology model for the next normal.
Challenge of finding skillsets
With hybrid cloud, organisations can decide to keep their critical data and workloads in the private cloud environment and also enables organisations’ IT staffs to optimise the network and minimise latency.
Similarly, Ranjan said that organisations can also leverage the public cloud’s features to handle unpredictable workloads due to the seasonality and fluctuating workloads of the business need where organisations can easily scale up and scale down the cloud usage and fulfil their temporary cloud need which is difficult in a private cloud environment.
While the hybrid cloud offers a lot of business benefits, it also comes with certain challenges, he said. Managing multiple clouds via any third-party provider or by an in-house IT team is always challenging.
Moreover, finding skillsets to manage hybrid-cloud with cloud experts is also a challenge in many countries across the region.
Ranjan said that organisations need to do a thorough technical evaluation to understand the roadmap of their cloud journey, ease of migration, need to re-factor and re-engineer their existing applications, SLA management, and most importantly, understanding the role and responsibilities of their overall cloud management.
Era of multiplied innovation
Apart from the technical assessment, he said that data classification is also a critical factor that organisations need to do to decide which workloads need to stay on-premise in the private cloud and which can go in a public cloud environment.
“Evaluating regulatory or data privacy rules and personal data security compliances are of paramount importance. We are in an era of multiplied innovation where we see a lot of companies collaborating to drive the innovation within technology space,” he said.
Lack of interoperability and standardisation, he said will pose a challenge to the advancements of any technology and the cloud is not alone.
However, he said that he sees a lot of collaborations happening in the cloud space where vendors are collaborating to support customers together in their cloud journey.
One such example is SAP and Microsoft collaboration, another example is AWS and Salesforce.com partnerships.
“Apart from such global partnerships, the cloud providers have also invested to address the interoperability issues considering the accelerated adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud model where interoperability brings the win-win situations for the overall cloud ecosystem,” he said.
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