UAE firms ride high on cloud

ALKESH SHARMA / Emirates Business

Cloud computing is the new means for companies to ensure success and beat the throat-cut competition in UAE’s burgeoning business ecosystem. Not only big enterprises
but SMEs (small and medium enterprises) and start-ups also are
harnessing wonders of the clouds
to optimum levels in order to scale new heights.
“There are many secure platforms that have attracted businesses to opt for clouds. These mediums are easy to manage, accessible from anywhere and very economical in the long-run. We are expecting that over 80 percent of the UAE companies will start availing the cloud facilities in one or the other way by 2018,” Akshay Makhani, a technology researcher and consultant with a Dubai-based consultancy firm, told Emirates Business.
Makhani added that consumers will represent over 60 percent of the total cloud data center traffic by 2019 whereas it was only around 30 percent in 2014.
Not only UAE but other countries in the Middle East Africa (MEA) region are also fast treading the innovative path of cloud computing. It is evident in the recently released annual Cisco® Global Cloud Index (2014-2019), which predicted that MEA cloud traffic will grow over quadruple by 2019-end. Interestingly, nearly 83 percent of all MEA data center traffic will come from the cloud by 2019.
“Now increased number of people has access to smart mobile devices and they want more and more services out of them. They want to reach the official documents or access the latest music in no time. Besides, cloud also offers them expansive storage capacity, doing away with the need of data centers or carrying external hard drives,” Tom Gibbs, a cloud computing expert in UAE, told Emirates Business.
“Not only companies, but we also have many individuals in UAE who have their personal accounts on clouds. Also, both government and private entities are investing generously to facilitate cloud services. In the last couple of years, we have experienced an epic surge in the data center traffic coming from cloud platforms and it is really a good sign,” he pointed out.
Cisco Cloud Index says that the data center traffic will be up by nearly 32 percent from 2014 to 2019 while the cloud data center traffic will represent 86 percent of total data center traffic by 2019, compared to only 61 percent in 2014.
Mike Weston, Vice President, Cisco Middle East, during the official announcement of the Index, said, “Middle East enterprise and government organisations are moving from test cloud environments to trusting clouds with their mission-critical workloads. At the same time, consumers continue to expect on-demand, anytime access to their content and services nearly everywhere, creating opportunities for cloud operators.”