At Gitex, global interconnection and data centre company Equinix is demonstrating capabilities, which will help enterprises in the region to shape their digital transformation strategies.
“Over the last 20 years, we have built a global platform of data centres, where we have brought together carriers, services providers, system integrators, cloud service providers and now, more and more enterprises. It is allowing global enterprises to leverage our platform to execute their digital strategies. For example, if you are a brick-and-mortar retailer looking to move online and offload IT or an airline with a booking engine and website that wants to make sure user experience is the same all over the world, they can use our platform to enable their digital strategies,” says Jeroen Schlosser, Managing Director, Equinix MENA.
He says the Middle East has now reached the cloud computing tipping point, which will accelerate digital transformation initiatives. “Low oil prices over the last couple of years have forced many organisations to rethink IT budgets. At the same, many global cloud service providers and web shops are now moving the region. Governments around the region are encouraging businesses to go digital, and telecom service providers have developed expertise in the domains of cloud, security, storage, and networking. This has given enterprises tools and building blocks to incorporate into their digital strategies, which were not available two years ago.”
Schlosser says though cloud is gaining steam, organisations will continue to operate their on-premise data centres. “Hybrid architecture will be the future of IT because applications that don’t need a global presence and sensitive data sets will always reside in on-premise data centres. We have now learned that moving everything to the cloud may not be a wise move and companies will have to bring the network to the data centre and keep their valuable data and mission-critical workloads in their private cloud.”
At the show, Equinix is also highlighting its digital edge strategy, which it says, will be the key to success in the digital era. “Yesterday’s centralised IT architecture can’t support today’s bandwidth-intensive applications. What companies are looking to do is to push their technologies where people are and where data is, so that they can do real-time business analysis and expand into new markets. This is why they need the digital edge and interconnect oriented architecture,” adds Schlosser.
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