Monday, 8 August 2016 Blog ehdf

Adoption of Cloud Infrastructure Services in the Middle East

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) helps organizations re-allocate their time and resources, by making their IT infrastructure smarter and more flexible. This year, there has been an increased momentum in enterprise adoption of IaaS. A recent Gartner study predicts that IaaS is expected to grow from $60 million in 2013 to $138 million in 2017 across the MENA region.

Today, enterprises are aware of the advantages of utilising IaaS, PaaS, SaaS in a hybrid IT strategy as opposed to building their own on premise solutions. However, they are still cautious as they do not have many options for recognised cloud services provider in the region. eHDF, however, is one of the few companies in the UAE and amongst the first to offer cloud services.

Some Challenges

The Cisco Global Cloud Index (2013-2018) whitepaper estimates the highest cloud traffic growth rate (54 percent CAGR) for the Middle East and Africa, followed by Central and Eastern Europe (39 percent CAGR) and Asia Pacific (37 percent CAGR). Cloud is being widely accepted with most enterprise operations moving to the cloud. The SMB segment is also slowly following the trend. So in five years’ time, one word which might aptly describe cloud infrastructure services is – “everywhere”.

Crucial business applications may or may not move entirely onto cloud depending on the technological breakthroughs in cloud based security systems. Nevertheless, the uptake of private and hybrid clouds will definitely be higher and provide businesses umpteen reasons to invest in cloud in order to get more for less.

Some challenges that lie ahead:

-Security concerns for the data on cloud
-Compliance complications not allowing data to be hosted outside the region
-Lack of adequate skill sets

However, these challenges should not be considered as road blocks in the pursuit of cloud computing. It is rather important to give serious consideration to these issues and the possible ways out before adopting the technology.

Security

Contrary to popular belief, partnering with a reliable cloud services provider is far more secure than in-house server hosting. Cloud service providers have a team of experts across technology domains including data security. They normally have state-of-the-art technology and solutions in all areas including security, which may not necessarily be the case with Enterprise IT. Also, cloud service providers constantly invest in and upgrade their technology, knowledge, skills and expertise in order to offer the latest hosting services to their customers. A reputed services provider is also certified for various quality and security certifications and conduct regular security system audits. Owing to the fact that they run and manage systems for multiple customers, they continuously keep themselves updated about the changing security threat landscape across verticals.

Implementing the Cloud

Before implementing the cloud, CIOs need to assess the company’s long-term business and infrastructure needs, establish realistic goals and priorities, set deadlines and consult with finance directors on IT budgets. This is important because reversing IT systems is time-consuming and expensive. Apart from having an understanding of what resources are available for implementation and maintenance, CIOs should, with proper planning and strategy, keep the complexity and cost to a minimum. Also, determine if the migration will be managed in-house or outsourced to a third party vendor.

Before moving information to the cloud, CIOs need to conduct an internal review with business heads to identify which data can be moved to the cloud. Full cloud integration may cause regulatory compliance issues as certain data must be secured internally. Enterprises must also be cautious of where they store different types of data.

While choosing a cloud vendor, it is important for CIOs to review and evaluate their security standards, policies and governance models to ensure that their organizations’ data is safe, secure and protected at all times. They must be aware of procedural and policy differences between their organization and external companies and software vendors. They need to understand where the data will be stored and comply with the legal requirements in his own country as well as the country of the cloud services provider.

CIOs need to ensure that their organizations have effective data recovery and backup management tools in place in case of any loss during data synchronization. If the organization has planned to outsource the migration, it is important to know if the cloud services provider has a robust data backup strategy and recovery procedures.

We recommend partnering with a cloud services provider who offers service level agreements (SLAs) and follows security standards, processes and procedures.