Cloud Insight

CLOUDINSIGHT

A CXO INSIGHT MIDDLE EAST SUPPLEMENT

THE NEW NORMAL BUILDING A ROADMAP TO CLOUD

Cloud Insight | 1

Foreword

Cloud is the new normal Covid-19 has completely disrupted the business landscape, b u t at t h e s a m e t i m e, a c t i n g a s a c at a l ys t fo r d i g i t a l transformation across the globe. According to a poll by McKinsey, the pandemic has accelerated the digital plans of enterprises by as much as a decade in a matter of six months. One of the key enablers of digital transformation is the cloud, without which it would have been nearly impossible for firms to evolve and adapt to the new business imperatives. The onus is on IT leaders to enhance customer experience and faster time to market, and this is why the cloud plays an important role in digital transformation.

The cloud offers the agility, scale and simplification and automation of key workflows for enterprises looking to transform their business models.

According to IDC’s latest FutureScape report, by the end of 2021, 80% of enterprises will put a mechanism in place to shift to cloud-centric infrastructure and applications twice as fast as before the pandemic. Gartner also predicts that the global public cloud infrastructure will grow 35 percent to $120 billion this year. Without a doubt, the cloud is now shaping the new normal. For CIOs, the question is no longer whether their organizations should adopt cloud, but instead which workloads to migrate and chalk out a comprehensive cloud migration roadmap.

We have featured some of the leading cloud vendors in the market in this special supplement, who have shared their tips and various requirements you must address before making a move to the cloud.

Contents

4

Aruba

5

Cloud4C

6

D-Link

8

Exclusive Networks

12

Oracle

13

Site 24x7

10

Lenovo

14

Veritas Cloud Insight | 3

The secret to success

Jacob Chacko, Regional Director - Middle East, Saudi & South Africa at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, explains the top benefits of having a cloud-managed network.

infrastructure to be cloud-based. Cloud-managed networking, often provided “as-a-service,” is rapidly growing in popularity.

Throughout 2021, we expect to see cloud-based collaboration tools leading the way. The new normal is the hybrid workplace now, allowing employees to move seamlessly back and forth from the home and the office. There has been a surge in the use of collaboration or productivity tools. In 2021, people will likely keep working hybrid, and collaboration tools will be critical to productivity. Accessing these applications from anywhere and have the same experiences helps productivity and keeps the business moving.

We also expect AI to be used more widely in the cloud computing environment. The most prominent addition to the list of top benefits of AI in cloud computing is the ability to reshape your IT infrastructure. As a result, we see a high demand for AI-optimised application infrastructure now.

What are the main advantages of cloud-managed networking?

Cloud-managed networking is commonly used when referring to the ability to manage Wi-Fi, wired and SD-WAN network infrastructure as a cloud-based service. This service is typically hosted in the cloud by a third party as a subscription-based purchase model.

The number one reason why you need cloud-managed networking is simplicity – your network can be up in minutes and easy to manage. With cloud-managed networking, administrators can see their entire network, regardless of location, gather real-time data for planning and troubleshooting purposes, and make configuration changes from a single pane of glass.

This means no management hardware or travel is needed.

Another main advantage of cloud-managed networking is that the vendor manages the product and product update process. New features and functionality are continuously developed and automatically delivered, allowing IT to introduce new services instead of planning for downtime.

What are the top cloud computing trends to watch out for this year?

Let’s look at why cloud computing is important to businesses in the Middle East. Cloud services offer virtually unlimited compute and storage capacity, making it ideal for utilising advanced technologies such as AI/ML analytics solutions.

A cloud subscription-based model makes it easy to take advantage of new technologies that may have been resource or cost-prohibitive.

An immediate benefit is the cost and time savings achieved by eliminating the need for hardware and the resources needed to host traditional on-premises services. And because there’s virtually no ramp-up time, cloud-based solutions provide significant time-to-market and time-to-value that help businesses achieve a competitive advantage.

It is estimated that over ninety-two percent of businesses use at least one cloud-based application. And the majority of enterprises expect at least half of their management

4

| Cloud Insight

Why is cloud-enabled edge computing important for enterprises?

With over 55 billion IoT devices expected to generate more than 50% of the world’s data within the next two years, businesses seek to convert their data into new revenue streams and operational efficiencies. To do so reliably and securely, they need a network architecture that is edgecentric and cloud-native and designed to automate, unify and protect the edge.

Unified infrastructure is an important attribute of the Aruba Edge Service Platform architecture. Unifying the operations of wired, wireless, and SD-WAN infrastructure under one cloud-native command center, Aruba Central empowers administrators to automate the time-consuming manual process of moving information from screen to screen, tool to tool or trying to correlate information across multiple views.

By leveraging a unified data lake, Aruba ESP correlates and displays in Aruba Central multiple dimensions of information in context, unlocks powerful capabilities around automated root cause analysis, and provides more robust analytics.

Cloud simplified

Rakesh Reddy, regional director-MEA at Cloud4C, explains why businesses must engage managed cloud service providers.

What is driving the demand for managed cloud services in the Middle East?

Firstly, the cloud-first policy adopted in Middle Eastern countries such as UAE, Bahrain and KSA have propelled cloud adoption and, as a consequence, have increased the demand for managed services. We provide managed cloud services to over 150 enterprise customers in the Middle East across various public platforms. This also includes Cloud4Cs local data centres in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.

Secondly, the pandemic has changed consumer behaviour and impacted spending patterns. This change has disrupted the way the current businesses are run. Consequently, this disruption has put pressure on the organisations to innovate new supply chain models, service delivery systems, HR policies, and newer sales models and revisit their business continuity plans. And the only way to carry out these changes in a faster, scalable and secure manner is to adopt the journey on the cloud.

In response to the accelerated demand to embrace new technologies, optimise application performance and costs, companies are becoming increasingly dependent on managed

services players (MSP). The MSP can help unleash the entire power of the cloud, provide the industry- best application availability, robust BCP and DR solutions, support in adhering to data localisation laws, preventive and predictive issue resolutions, topped up with a promise to provide single SLA at app layer - all at a fraction of the price they would incur if they manage it all by themselves.

For successful business transformation propelled by cloud transformation, partners like Cloud4C become an ideal ally as the CIOs are able to leverage the vast pool of readily available cloud-certified experts coupled with automation-driven managed services delivery, 24/7. Cloud4C helps organisations migrate, manage, secure, and optimise the cloud and take the responsibility of providing a single SLA of 99.9% uptime at the application login level with instant 40% TCO reduction.

Can you help to manage the multi-cloud environments of your customers?

With 2000+ cloud experts, certified on leading public cloud platforms and 25 ‘Centers of Excellence’ spanning different application providers like SAP, Intellect Design, Finacle, Microsoft etc., and hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, IBM Cloud, Cloud4C is well-equipped to manage critical workloads in a multi-cloud environment. Our homegrown automation platform, the Self-healing Operations Platform (SHOP), makes it easy and way too economical for enterprises to manage multi-cloud set-ups. It provides a single pane dashboard showing a holistic view of their environments.

We understand that enterprises choose multi-cloud architecture to distribute workloads across multiple cloud environments so that they can get the best returns possible while mitigating risks associated with individual cloud environments. Cloud4C will help enterprises chalk out the roadmap to migrate, manage multi-cloud environments, and modernise their applications and data. To optimise costs and improve efficiency, if you are thinking multi-cloud, you should be thinking about Cloud4C. Do you help your clients meet their compliance requirements?

With more infrastructure to protect, evolving regulatory landscape to adhere to, more stringent governance requirements, burgeoning IoT and Industrial IoT deployments, and above all, innovation becoming the lynchpin for resilience and survival, meeting compliance requirements has become a mammoth task besides being a critical one. Cloud4C offers automation enabled ‘compliance as a service, where we take end-to-end responsibility in maintaining all the required compliance and security controls on the cloud with quarterly or monthly compliance and gap assessments reports leveraging various automation tools. With a unique compliance as a service (Caas) offering, we make it easy for enterprises to continuously maintain compliance with a broad array of industry, country-specific, and worldwide standards and regulations to effectively protect their organizations.

The geography-specific standards that Cloud4C helps organisations adhere to are OJK, NESA, DFSA, SAMA, Dubai IRS (UAE).

Cloud Insight | 5

Bracing for digital disruption

Sakkeer Hussain, Director of Sales and Marketing at D-Link Middle East and Africa, says cloud adoption has become essential to digital transformation success.

Which are the top cloud trends to watch for this year?

Businesses across the globe are accelerating their cloud objectives and transforming into digital-first enterprises, especially as a result of the pandemic. This means we will see an even bigger adoption of cloud technologies during this year.

As remote working and work-from-home/anywhere models become the norm, we can expect to see organisations investing in robust cloud-based solutions for seamless collaboration, effective communication and creative ways for product or service development. We will see companies capitalising on the benefits of hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud models. More and more customers will also look at as-a-service models for flexible cloud consumption considering tighter budgets and the need for quick scalability.

Increasingly, cloud will also allow companies to leverage technologies like AI and ML to enhance productivity and

6

| Cloud Insight

business efficiency. Cloud security will be one of the top concerns for technology leaders. Businesses will seek providers who can equip them with customised solutions that fit their unique requirements to secure their growing businesses in the digital world.

Do you have any offerings for remote works and WFH environments?

Nuclias Connect and Nuclias Cloud Remote Network Management Solutions are integral components of our transformative remote work solutions portfolio and are value-added market differentiators.

Nuclias Cloud portfolio allows SMBs and large enterprises across retail, education and hospitality, as well as MSPs, to deploy professional-grade networks from anywhere and anytime, eliminating physical space constraints. Convenience, cost-effectiveness and ease of use make the solutions ideal for onboarding, studying, troubleshooting as well as monitoring and reporting network activity quickly and easily.

Nuclias Managed Wireless Networking Solutions offer the capability, hosting flexibility, and value that customers need to carry out their digital transformation efforts with minimal interruptions. The solutions offer centralised remote network management via an intuitive interface, and multi-tenant architecture that makes outsourcing simple for end-users.

For remote working models to succeed, it is important to ensure the right technologies are being utilised, from both employees’ as well as the corporate’s end. Communication is critical when working remotely and this is strengthened by video conferencing and other cloud-based and networking solutions. For all these digital solutions to be effective, the underpinning technology is a strong, stable and seamless Wi-Fi connection along with robust routers.

D-Link’s state-of-the-art Wi-Fi 6 routers - DIR-X1560 EXO AX AX1500 and DIR-X1860 EXO AX AX1800 – are the ideal tools to ensure uninterrupted connections. Powered with Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) technology, these routers provide faster speeds, greater capacity and less network congestion.

Can you tell us more about your cloud contact centre solution?

Through D-Link’s exclusive partnership with India-based call centre software provider Ameyo, we offer cloud-based omni-channel contact centre solutions for the Middle East market. With this strategic collaboration, D-Link is the exclusive UAE and Oman cloud partner for Ameyo.

Our objective is to offer exciting opportunities for our regional partners to leverage the hardware reliability from D-Link and the software services and capabilities from Ameyo under one umbrella. Ameyo’s portfolio features omnichannel contact centre solutions and helpdesk and ticketing Software. As part of their digital transformation journey, regional enterprises can now revamp their traditional contact center infrastructure and save on huge costs with the combined power of Ameyo and D-Link.

Cloud Adoption through Automation Driven Transformation

Cloud Insight | 7

Securing the cloud

Serge Ghanem, Technical Solutions Manager at Exclusive Networks ME, on how to navigate the common security challenges of a multi-cloud strategy.

What are some of the top cloud trends to watch out for this year?

The disruption caused by the pandemic has reinforced the critical importance of businesses being agile to scale with customer demand. Some recent reports proved that the long roadmap of digital transformation was compressed into days or weeks to respond to market needs. Businesses across industries had to find new ways to reach, communicate and transact with their customers regardless of whether they are in a B2B or B2C business. These demands created tremendous pressure on the businesses and IT organisations, forcing the companies to adopt a more agile way to deliver these experiences faster to the market.

Considering all the above, we believe that multi-cloud adoption is the dominant trend among the majority of enterprises moving their workload across on-premise, off-premise, private and public clouds. Organisations will seek the flexibility of a multi-cloud approach to meet their desired outcomes for varied workloads.

Is cloud adoption an enabler for digital transformation?

While digital transformation strategies and execution are not particularly assigned to the IT organisation, business decision-makers are becoming more and more involved in the

8

| Cloud Insight

IT buying decision-making process due to the huge impact of the transformative technologies on the overall business.

As a core enabler in the digital transformation journey, cloud adoption has been on the radar for business decisionmakers to help them unlock further possibilities, scale up, and furnish the agility needed to grow.

Cloud is a critical investment and de facto route for organisations with a disruptive vision and opportunity outlook in multiple new business channels, including e-commerce, AI, IoT, and social media.

What are your tips for cloud migration?

The success of cloud migration projects depends on multiple factors and requires a deep dive planning and assessment.

As a starting point, organisations need to start with a cloud readiness assessment across multiple technical and business requirements to determine if they are ready to make a move yet. An in-depth understanding of the company›s operations and existing assets will help them shape the best path forward to create the right cloud migration strategy.

Once a cloud migration strategy is in place, the company needs to create a migration plan by following some essential elements, such as determining which workload can or cannot be migrated to the cloud. The next step is to select the suitable cloud platform/model and decide whether to embark on a phased or hybrid execution plan. It is also essential to think of the foundational architecture of the cloud from networking, security, data protection, and automation perspectives.

Is hybrid cloud going to be the future?

Not all types of data can be in a public cloud, which is why some forward-thinking companies are choosing a mixture of the hybrid cloud services approach. An example of this is having your business-critical applications containing sensitive data managed in your local data centre that cannot be moved to the cloud while still securely communicating with third-party requests from another application or component requests residing on the public or private cloud.

Is cloud security more mature now?

Cybersecurity and data sovereignty has always been a concern for IT and business leaders throughout their cloud migration adoption process. However, with a vast majority of leading legacy IT security vendors extending their offering to the cloud and several niche cybersecurity vendors entering the market to make the cloud space more secure, it is no longer a challenge it once was.

The real challenge is to map the right vendor offering with the security requirements of native cloud developments in conjunction with public cloud migration projects. We believe that selecting the right security vendor and a correctly sized solution is no longer locked to any major cloud provider. The skillset maturity of the end-users is on the rise with them defining the preferred rules, procedures, business needs, security needs and compliance requirements. Exclusive Networks is particularly excited about the rapid acceleration of cloud adoption in the Middle East during 2021, of which security will remain a significant area of attention.

Improve the Performance, Reliability, and Security of Your Applications

How NGINX Can Help You Move to the Cloud:

Eliminate Vendor Lock‑In

Security

Microservices

Don’t get trapped by your public cloud

Reduce security breaches and

Service discovery, end‑to‑end

vendor; with NGINX Plus you’re free

limit your company’s exposure

encryption, flexible deployments

to deploy in any cloud: public, private,

to malicious users

or hybrid

Support Unlimited Apps

API Management

Maximize Compatibility

Reduce complexity and costs by using

Trust NGINX Plus to manage

NGINX Plus is compatible with

a single NGINX Plus instance to deliver

and secure your business‑

Kubernetes, Docker, Mesos, and

all your apps

critical APIs

your app development tools

To discover how NGINX can help you, visit nginx.com. ©2021 F5, Inc. All rights reserved. NGINX, NGINX Plus, F5, the NGINX logo, and the F5 logo are trademarks of F5, Inc. in the U.S. and in certain other countries. Other F5 trademarks are identified at f5.com. Any other products, services, or company names referenced herein may be trademarks of their respective owners with no endorsement or affiliation, expressed or implied, claimed by F5.

The best of both worlds Dr. Christopher Cooper, Director & General Manager, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Lenovo Middle East and Africa, says hybrid cloud is the future of IT.

What are the top cloud trends to watch out for this year?

Hybrid cloud is the key to meeting the demands of today’s IT requirements, and having hybrid cloud capabilities is no longer an option, it should be a core aspect of any CIO’s data management strategies. As data volumes explode, organizations are finding that they need to migrate some applications to the cloud, while maintaining some workloads on-premises, and hybrid cloud increasingly is becoming the IT environment of choice to address these emerging requirements.

Research indicates that hybrid cloud expenditures will surge by nearly 19% annually over a five-year period, reaching

10

| Cloud Insight

$128 billion by 2025. IDC says that 70% of enterprises will integrate their multiple clouds and on-premises environments into a hybrid cloud architecture by 2022 .

Although hybrid cloud allows organisations to strike a balance between operational agility and economic efficiency, managing a hybrid cloud environment can create substantial data management challenges, including the need to maintain the acceptable performance metrics such as high IOPS and low latency as workloads and data volumes scale dramatically. Data must be protected and secured regardless of its location and whether it is at rest or in flight. Data management must properly address compliance and governance demands, as well as operate as cost efficiently as possible. Finally, data migration must be seamless, intelligent, automated and reliable.

Can you tell us more about your cloud-based solutions for business agility?

From the data centre to the edge, Lenovo delivers infrastructure solutions including servers, storage, data management, hyper-converged infrastructure, artificial intelligence, highperformance computing, software-defined infrastructure and global services and support Lenovo offers a one-stop solution for hybrid cloud management, rather than forcing customers to build a stack using solutions from multiple vendors. This makes it simpler and more cost effective for IT to manage, secure and scale.

Storage administrators don’t have multiple consoles and components, saving them time and headaches. Additional benefits include the ability to do simple S3 tiering to the cloud for backup and archiving, which means you can consolidate resources in the data center and get rid of older technologies such as tape backup or spinning disk drives.

You can also use Cloud Volumes to build high availability and disaster recovery models in the cloud or give DevOps teams quick and easy access to the infrastructure they need when they need it.

Across the portfolio, Lenovo offers flexible data management solutions to cost effectively meet specific customer requirements from the edge to the core data centre. In the current economic environment, as customers look to reduce capital costs, Lenovo provides storage and compute in a complete end-to-end, data centre- as-a-service model with Lenovo TruScale. TruScale provides enterprise storage on premises in a true monthly pay-for what-you-use consumption model that can eliminate capital expenses and transform how customers consume technology and innovation.

We have just announced the next-generation Lenovo ThinkSystem servers, built on 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and PCIe Gen4. This new generation introduces innovations for real-world workloads including high performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), modeling and simulation, cloud, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and advanced analytics.

InfoScale Software-Defined Storage can reduce your cost while boosting performance, scalability & availability.

Highly available, enterprise-proven storage virtualization software A software-defined infrastructure built for the largest, most demanding organizations that can’t compromise on performance and availability. InfoScale easily spans physical, virtual and cloud.

These businesses rely on Veritas InfoScale for Availability.

10/10 10 of the top 10

Financial institutions

11/12 11 of the top 12 Investment banks

10/10 10 of the top 10 Telco companies

10/10 10 of the top 10

Healthcare organizations

Feature Highlights of Infoscale: • Scale easily and cost-effectively as needed with hardware-independent storage.

• Deliver mission-critical levels of availability and performance while simultaneously providing more agile and streamlined data and workload mobility.

• Save time and money by extending your storage environment to the cloud.

• Help ensure high-performance and availability for your mission critical apps in the cloud or on-premises.

A new reality Kirk Carlsen, Dee Houchen and Jennifer Toomey from Oracle on how to make a big move to in-demand, “as-a-service” business models

market capitalisation by 10 percent; investing in innovation after a crisis gives them a 30-percent advantage.”

CFOs and their teams are an essential part of decisionmaking for new business model innovation, and making sure investments deliver on expectations is vital.

Organisations need to evaluate their most and least profitable lines of business, locations, or products, so they can shift resources as necessary. Finance professionals who use profitability and cost management solutions can help identify areas to reduce costs and uncover investment opportunities.

Best practices for business model innovation To help finance leaders as they lead this charge, Oracle is offering a Finance Starter Kit with best practices and advice on first steps. Below is an abbreviated version of best practices as outlined in the kit.

Best practice #1: Rethink what your target customers want Collect feedback via social listening, customer community groups, surveys, events—anywhere customer voices are prominent. This will help you to identify what your customers want and don’t want, as well as what is motivating them to make a change.

Best practice #2: Analyse various business models Take advantage of scenario modeling. Model different scenarios for multiple offerings, market conditions, or other key drivers that can help you stay aligned with your revenue goals.

In 2020, our humble homes became the essential support beam for both human health and business continuity, something that wouldn’t have been possible without “asa-service” applications for food delivery, physician care, day-to-day job responsibilities, and more.

The as-a-service business model certainly isn’t new.

Everything from music to movies to maintenance can be delivered using a subscription model. But it’s fair to say that people value these services now more than ever, and they are an emerging opportunity for businesses looking to build new revenue streams.

In fact, many businesses are already there. In an October 2020 survey, 62 percent of all companies said they’ve implemented solutions to manage an increased demand for online interactions and services. And more than half of respondents (53 percent) believe the change will stick after the pandemic subsides, as consumers and customers settle into the “next normal.”

Introducing new revenue streams based on the as-a-service shift is one of four Big Moves that finance leaders should make to grasp opportunity and move their businesses forward.

How finance drives value in new business models Optimizing your portfolio might not be a top priority right now, but research indicates that it should be. McKinsey & Company analysis found that “companies that invest in innovation during a crisis outperform the competition on

12

| Cloud Insight

Best practice #3: Collaborate throughout the innovation life cycle To get the most ROI out of your innovation efforts, break down silos and create a process that involves multiple stakeholders. One of the most effective ways to collaborate is with a connected suite of cloud applications.

Best practice #4: Design for customer success Customer satisfaction is the biggest predictor of future revenue for as-a-service offerings. If your customers aren’t happy, they won’t renew. Integrated cloud suites can help you configure an offer, price it, provide a quote, simplify contract negotiations, and provide self-service options for customers to modify or change their subscriptions.

Best practice #5: Measure outcomes and respond quickly This is where finance needs to collaborate closely with lineof-business leaders to keep them informed about what’s working well—and what isn’t—so that business leaders can quickly change course for a better outcome. KPIs for a new business model might include annual recurring revenue (ARR), customer churn, renewals, and customer lifetime value.

The pendulum of crisis has swung from focusing reactively on survival, to being proactive for growth. Take some time to consider how new business models could help your business build long-lasting advantages.

A path to transformational change

Rajalakshmi Srinivasan - Director, Site24x7, explains the importance of a cloud migration roadmap and why cloud-native is going to be a force to be reckoned with.

Third-party tools often play a major role in monitoring and managing these environments.

Data analysis and correlation are important aspects of any IT infrastructure monitoring tool. However, correlating data in silos across multiple tools that monitor the multicloud environment can be a real challenge. This is why using a single tool that consolidates metrics from various environments and provides meaningful insight in a unified dashboard is a major advantage.

Another way to effectively monitor multi-cloud environments is to leverage AI to proactively provide smart alerting and reporting to prevent issues from affecting the end user’s digital experience.

What are the top cloud trends to watch out for this year?

With cloud adoption rates increasing in organisations of all sizes, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments are gaining prominence. The future will favour serverless applications and Function-as-a-Service solutions. Cloud environments provide elasticity and pay-as-you-scale models, which greatly benefits serverless architectures.

The trend could shift from organisations migrating to the cloud to them building their own cloud-native applications.

Deploying cloud-native apps on Kubernetes and other containerised infrastructures will be inevitable when adopting the latest trends. Additionally, as the amount of data extracted for meaningful insights increases over time, AIOps will play a significant role in proactive monitoring.

How can you help your clients to monitor their multi-cloud environments?

Businesses are not restricted to single-cloud environments.

Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments are here to stay.

Cloud cost management is a challenge for many CIOs. What can IT leaders do to avoid cost overrun?

Use a cloud cost management tool that can monitor resource utilisation. This will help you to understand overutilised and underutilised resources. Allocate budgets and track consumption by region, data type, resource type, and data transfer, and more. The tool should also help break down spending and drive cost accountability across your business units.

What are your tips for CIOs looking to migrate their workloads to cloud environments?

Since business environments and their challenges are unique, the requirements when migrating to the cloud vary for each organisation.

Migrating to the cloud isn’t just about workloads and operations; it requires an organisational and cultural shift for both your internal system and your customers. A few points to consider while migrating are: 1. Take it one step at a time.

2. Don’t move your entire workload at once.

3. Move it in stages so your end users are not adversely affected 4. Use current cloud technologies instead of legacy ones so your cloud adoption will be quicker, easier, and more secure.

5. Move your day-to-day workload to the cloud to gain visibility into real-time issues. This will give you enough room to address problems before your customers are affected.

Cloud Insight | 13

Dealing with data

Arthur Dell, Head of Technology International – Veritas Technologies, explains the perks of cloud data management.

What are the key benefits of data management in the cloud?

Removing the infrastructure cost element and all associated operational costs is a major drawcard to many organisations.

Furthermore, the ability to offer simplified management where cost is proportional to usage is a significant differentiator.

Traditional infrastructure overhead is removed, along with continued buying cycles with ever-growing data and the tools required to manage it.

As cloud adoption accelerates, managing and protecting data at scale grows increasingly complex. When a cloud service is used, data sent to the cloud is often stored in different cloud data centres across different locations, possibly in different countries. The proliferation of different data types creates unique challenges. Many organisations deploy disparate data management and data protection tools in distinct silos 14

| Cloud Insight

across on-premises and public-cloud environments. Having the ability to manage all elements of cloud data by utilising a single set of tools that are transposed across the entire landscape is a major advantage.

What are your tips for CIOs to optimize their multi-cloud environments?

Protecting data is not the cloud provider’s responsibility but remains the responsibility of the organisation and is a key requirement that should be addressed upfront.

Having visibility into what types of data exist and where these data types need to be stored is a key consideration.

This allows organisations to intelligently host and protect data with performance and protection that matches the business need. Having the means to ensure that applications remain highly available and where data and systems can be migrated simply and efficiently is also a consideration. Of paramount importance is that all of these capabilities exist within a single platform to ensure that simplicity is preserved.

How can you ensure data protection in the cloud?

Digital transformation, and especially cloud adoption, has accelerated due to the global pandemic. To support widespread remote working, enterprises are creating more data and facing a business imperative to move their applications out of their own data centres to the cloud. A new global survey of nearly 2,700 IT leaders and professionals in 21 countries, conducted

by Wakefield Research and commissioned by Veritas, has determined that as this shift accelerates, resiliency planning has not kept pace, creating a significant resiliency gap. There are numerous reasons, but the key is that while enterprises have found the cloud to be an easy-to-adopt platform for running applications and information storage, they’ve found it much more difficult to implement a platform for resiliency.

There is an urgent need for enterprises to close this resiliency gap by accelerating their resiliency planning to keep pace with today’s speed and increasing complexity of IT. Having a data protection strategy that is clearly defined and implemented is key. This option may be cloud resident or onpremises. A key consideration is implementing a mechanism that ensures a hybrid or multi-cloud data protection platform exists in a unified, cross-platform, single solution configuration.

Do you see demand for cloud storage in the region?

Our research showed that 29% of United Arab Emirates enterprises have adopted a hybrid multi-cloud strategy, and 53% store all of part of their data in the cloud. The average business in the UAE is using about nine cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), with 10% using more than 20. By comparison, the global average is 12.

So, absolutely yes, the growth curve in cloud adoption in the region is significant and will continue. While this is clearly evident, it is key that organisations consider the broader aspects of data protection to ensure that the migration, protection, and availability of their applications and data is simplified and de-risked.

Transform your data center with hyperconverged infrastructure Lenovo ThinkAgile HCI solutions deliver one flexible pool of resources and a simpler path to cloud.

Which HCI flavor is the best choice for you?

Lenovo ThinkAgile HCI enables you to achieve your goals with a solution that fits your hypervisor preference and other requirements

Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series solutions integrate Nutanix software to greatly reduce IT infrastructure expenses and TCO, support multiple HCI software hypervisors. You can accelerate use cases such as virtual desktops.

Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Series solutions are built on Microsoft Azure Stack HCI software, Windows Admin Center management, and native integration with Azure hybrid services which make it easy to extend applications to the cloud.

Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series solutions, powered by VMware software, deliver value from day one by helping you to automate resource optimization, improve business agility, and take the easiest path to hybrid cloud.

Learn more: https://www.lenovo.com/ae/en/data-center/solutions/

© Lenovo 2021. All rights reserved. Lenovo and the Lenovo logo are trademarks of Lenovo.