Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 12 | Page 16

ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY Regional datacentres heading for revamp A cloud-first priority, ageing datacentres, weak administration practices and securing the edge are among a host of revamp challenges that regional datacentre administrators are now facing. By Arun Shankar. M odernising datacentre infrastructure is one of the top investment priorities for Middle East organisations, along with cloud and Middle East CIOs are choosing software- with software-defined infrastructure, defined solutions that can meet their SLA such as VMware Cloud Foundation, requirements and scale up. or a do-it-yourself approach with Four key aspects comprise the modern hyper-converged infrastructure, such information security, all three of which are datacentre: a foundation of hyper- as with VMware vSAN,” says Ossama the foundations of digital transformation converged infrastructure, which can in Eldeeb, Senior Manager, MENA Partner and new digital business models in the turn support virtual machines, virtual Organisation, VMware. mobile cloud and Internet of Things eras. networks and virtual storage. In the Middle East CIOs are clamouring for software-driven and application-centric partners need to gain the knowledge and modernised datacentres to drive IT and world, modern datacentres can reduce IT experience in deploying hyper-converged business transformation. complexity, increase speed and agility, and infrastructure and, equally important, scale up to meet future business needs, provide around-the-clock support to to reduce IT infrastructure costs (39%), and leverage automation to configure, customers whose IT staff may not be improve IT service levels (32%), and provision, deploy and secure applications. fully up-to-date on how to optimise Globally, CIOs want modern datacentres respond to new business requirements “Channel partners can play a vital role “In the Middle East, channel their newfound datacentre solutions,” (28%). Datacentre vendors need to realise in assisting Middle East CIOs in their that as the pace of technological change digital transformation and datacentre quickens, end-user organisations do not modernisation strategies. There are two Cloud shift want to be locked into expensive and out- main challenges: whether to take an Gartner’s latest IT spending forecast shows of-date hardware solutions. Increasingly, integrated cloud infrastructure platform that spending on datacentre systems is 16 continues Eldeeb. Issue 12 INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS