18th Edition

Dear Valued Customer and Business Partners,

Welcome to the 18th edition of the eHDF newsletter.

Reflecting on 2018, it is with pleasure that I share with you some of our key achievements from last year. Over the last few months, we have witnessed an influx of technology trends that are setting the growth path for Cloud and Managed Security Services. These include aggressive digitization, connected devices and the high penetration levels of mobility into the work force which makes it critical for companies to ready themselves for the future. Owing to this, we further strengthened our Cloud and Security portfolio and were able to successfully deploy many digital transformation projects for our growing customer base in a variety of verticals.

eHDF’s mission is to help customers architect, deploy, manage and secure their workloads, no matter where these workloads reside. Such workloads can be on customer premises, hosted with eHDF or on public cloud. We have taken some strategic actions to enable us to deliver on that mission, one of which was the acquisition of LiveRoute, a Microsoft Gold Partner in the region. The acquisition allowed eHDF to strengthen its portfolio of Cloud services by including LiveRoute’s Public Cloud offerings based on Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Microsoft SharePoint services, along with other services like Data Centre Migration, Back up as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

Overall, 2018 has been a successful year for eHDF with many strategic developments on the technology innovation front and customer acquisition. We have a lot planned for 2019 as well so stay tuned for our announcements on additional capabilities that eHDF will bring to the market.

Finally, I would like to thank you all for your continued trust in eHDF and assure you of our utmost commitment always.

Cordially,

Yasser Zeineldin
CEO, eHDF

Gaining Impetus

Software as a Service (SaaS) is rapidly changing the IT landscape in the Middle East. Applications and processes that have traditionally been on-premises are now becoming externalized, provided by third parties and solution providers via the Cloud. While this ultimately brings many benefits in terms of cost, space and efficiency, transitioning to this new reality can be tumultuous for IT management.

Yasser Zeineldin, CEO, eHosting DataFort, said with extensive experience in the Cloud infrastructure business since 2001, the company has seen a tremendous growth of the SaaS market in the Middle East.

“Digitisation across the Middle East spearheaded by Government initiatives is one of the most significant factors pushing the growth of SaaS, ”he added.

Everyday administration of IT infrastructure across a business and its processes is an involved and specific task that usually falls outside the core competencies of the enterprise.

Businesses across industry verticals and a cross section of scale, complexity and requirements in the Middle East are migrating to a structure that delegates most of their information technology related concerns to an external services provider.

Here are a few signs that can help indicate that your company might be a prime candidate for generating efficiencies and advantages through the adoption of this strategy.

Initiating a Cloud Hosting solution is a multi-faceted endeavor that requires the IT and business-oriented wings of an enterprise to operate in tandem. The culture, size, nature and other specifics of an organization – logistics, regulations and operational complexities, among others – need to inform all decisions around the transformation.

A coherent and comprehensive plan that anticipates and accounts for the challenges can be the difference between a successful and smooth transition and a flawed implementation. Here are some considerations that can help to streamline the process.