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(left to right) Fadi Kanafani at NetApp; Mohammed Abukhater, FireEye; Ossama Eldeeb, VMware and Ray Kafity,
Attivo Networks.
Adoption of a cloud infrastructure provides an affordable, efficient and agile environment for
business processes, turning data from a burden into an asset, and more and more organisations in
the region are making the transition. By Pippa Sanderson.
A
ccording to Gartner, the public
cloud services market in the
Middle East and North Africa
(MENA) region is projected to grow 22.2
per cent in 2017 to $1.2billion, up from
$956 million in 2016. In addition, the
fifth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index
(2014–19) forecasts that Middle East
and Africa cloud traffic will more than
quadruple by the end of 2019. Not only
that, by 2019, a total of 83 per cent of all
MEA datacentre traffic will come from
the cloud. From a regional perspective,
the report found that the MEA is
expected to have the highest cloud traffic
growth rate of 41 per cent by 2019.
Cloud computing is quickly becoming
the standard way for technology
companies to access IT infrastructure,
software and hardware resources. The
technology enables companies to be able
to use applications and other resources
managed by third-party companies that
are stored in high-end server computers
and networks. “Cloud adoption, in general,
has definitely seen an increased uptake in
the Middle East as more businesses are
gaining confidence in both the security and
reliability of the cloud,” says Shadi Salama,
Channel Leader – Middle East, Cisco.
According to Jeroen Schlosser,
Managing Director of Equinix MENA,
“Every cloud journey is unique. From
scoping out the initial requirements,
all the way to managing the mix of
applications and services on which the
business depends. Today, businesses can
be found at every stage of this journey,
with some just getting started and others
completely invested.”
Cloud computing can be undertaken
in three main ways: private, public
and hybrid.
•
•
Private cloud: Private cloud
resources are shared among internal
departments and users, allowing
them to self-provision and scale
hardware or software resources as
needed. Private clouds are not ‘open
to the public’ and are protected
within a closed environment.
Public cloud: A public cloud is
an on-demand IT service in which
computing resources are delivered
over the Internet by an external cloud
service provider. These resources,
including Software as a Service
(SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS)
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