FUTURE TECHNOLOGY continue to play a central role in the datadriven future.
4. Need for scalable infrastructure
The Middle East is witnessing a surge in data centre investments, driven by ambitious government agendas to accelerate digital transformation. According to a recent report by Arizton, the region’ s data centre market is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 9 % from 2023 to 2029, with the UAE and Saudi Arabia leading the way through initiatives like Saudi Vision 2030 and the UAE’ s National Digital Transformation Programme.
These projects are fuelling demand for robust, scalable, and secure storage solutions. Industry providers such as Western Digital are actively contributing to this transformation by providing advanced storage technologies and expertise to support the region’ s digital ambitions
5. Data sovereignty
The UAE has become a regional leader in cloud, data, and AI, underpinned by its 2023 National Cloud Security Policy. This policy sets clear security standards and prioritises local cloud infrastructure, making data sovereignty a top concern. For many organisations, there is a real“ wish to physically hug their server” to know exactly where data resides and that it’ s protected by national laws.
Beyond regulatory compliance, local servers can be one factor in a Zero-Trust security strategy and deliver the low latency needed for advanced workloads
like Generative AI and IoT. By ensuring local access to stored data on-premises or in a private cloud, organisations can accelerate model training and real-time analytics. Some IT managers benefit from the flexibility of disaggregated storage architectures that optimise both performance and resource utilisation. Especially for AI workloads, disaggregated storage is ideal as it decouples compute and storage, improving resource utilisation and lower TCO by avoiding overprovisioning and maximising infrastructure efficiency across diverse AI pipelines.
Furthermore, it enables flexible, scalable access to massive datasets with high throughput and lower latency across GPU clusters.
6. Software-defined storage
As organisations embrace hybrid and multicloud strategies, the shift toward software-defined storage, SDS is accelerating. SDS decouples data management from physical hardware, giving IT teams the flexibility to deploy, scale, and optimise storage resources with unprecedented agility. This is especially valuable as enterprises consolidate data centres and navigate increasingly complex infrastructures.
At the same time, AI is transforming storage management itself. Intelligent storage systems now leverage AI for tasks like automated data tiering, predictive optimisation, and even threat detection, making storage more autonomous, resilient,
The size of AI training datasets has grown, with median training sets ballooning from 42 billion data points in 2021 to over 750 billion in 2023.
and secure. As these capabilities mature, software-defined and intelligent storage will be central to building the agile, futureready data infrastructure that modern organisations require.
The future of storage is about more than capacity, it is about adaptability, efficiency, and intelligence. Storage is not just an IT concern; it’ s the foundation upon which tomorrow’ s breakthroughs will be built. •
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