IBM: Most UAE C-Suite Executives Pursuing or Planning Hybrid Cloud
UAE C-Suite executives see hybrid cloud as a solution for flexibility, cost savings, conducting testing and development, as well as disaster recovery, according to an IBM study.
A new IBM study conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC) has revealed that 85 percent of C-Suite executives surveyed in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are pursuing or planning to implement hybrid cloud strategies in their organisations.
The study revealed that C-Suite executives surveyed in the UAE are prioritising the implementation of hybrid cloud strategies to help their organisations benefit from flexibility, cost savings, testing and development, as well as disaster recovery. However, while there is a growing shift towards the cloud, further adoption of hybrid cloud strategies are needed to help organisations transform their operations using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).
The new study polled over 500 C-Suite executives across 12 industry sectors, including highly regulated industries, such as government, telecommunication and banking, in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and South Africa. The survey was commissioned as a result of the growing importance of hybrid cloud for enterprises in the region and the transformational impact that COVID-19 has had on businesses.
Increasing prioritisation of hybrid cloud
The study also found that while only 32 percent of C-Suite executives surveyed from the UAE are currently pursuinghybrid cloud strategies, over 50 percent are in the planning phase.
C-Suite executives polled in the UAE pointed to their organisation’s strategic requirements for adopting hybrid cloud over the next 12 months. Specifically, 68 percent cited flexibility and significant cost savings they expect from implementing a hybrid cloud strategy, while 56 percent view cloud as useful for conducting testing and development before moving their business-critical workloads to a production environment. Half of UAE C-Suite executives surveyed view hybrid cloud as a solution to any potential disaster recovery requirements their organisation may need.
Additionally, C-Suite executives surveyed in the UAE see hybrid cloud as an important step towards application modernisation or developing cloud-native applications. 65 percent of UAE C-Suite executives polled cited the ease of application deployment in adopting hybrid cloud in their organizations, 58 percent want to leverage the operational benefits, and 55 percent believe the technology will aid resource allocation improvements.
“It is evident that hybrid cloud strategies are becoming core to digital transformation journeys and increasingly prioritized in the UAE to help revolutionise business models,” said Hossam Seif El-Din, General Manager of IBM in the Middle East and Pakistan. “IBM is working with its customers in the UAE and across the globe to accelerate their hybrid cloud efforts and prepare them for transformational technologies like AI. As organizations in the UAE transform their operations, hybrid cloud will continue to be adopted to provide flexibility and efficiencies and improve the bottom line.”
Hybrid cloud adoption is key for enterprise digital transformation
In the UAE, several companies from various industries have adapted their corporate structure to hybrid cloud.
Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank (ADIB) is a leading bank in the UAE and the 4th largest Islamic bank in the world. It selected IBM hybrid cloud solutions based on the Red Hat OpenShift to further modernize its operations, automate processes, provide its customers with improved digital banking experiences and bring new services to market faster.
The hybrid cloud model’s growing prominence stems from its agile architecture, which allows businesses to manage multiple clouds designated to meet current and incremental business requirements, data, and workloads in a secured and governed manner. A hybrid cloud landscape may include the combination of one or more on-premise infrastructures, internally managed or outsourced private clouds, public clouds from multiple providers, and even the infrastructure for legacy and most modern IoT and Edge systems—all running simultaneously to fuel the digitization needs of the enterprise.
The study polled over 500 C-Suite Executives across 12 industries in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and South Africa. It was conducted in cooperation with International Data Cooperation (IDC).
