IBM Services today announced two IBM Data Centers in the UAE, one in Abu Dhabi and the other in Dubai, to provide cloud managed services to enterprises and help accelerate their journey to hybrid cloud. IBM Services is the services and consultancy arm of IBM.
The local data centres will help organisations shift to a hybrid cloud model and benefit from having the flexibility to move select critical workloads to a secure local cloud environment hosted in the UAE while keeping mission-critical data on-premise. This will not only omit the need to invest in additional physical space for local data residency, but help organisations abide by their data sovereignty requirements and restrictions. Organisations will also be able to integrate this local cloud environment with their existing IT infrastructure and different cloud environments.
In a highly competitive cloud market, IBM’s strategy revolves around hybrid and multi-cloud environments to distinguish itself from others.
Hossam Seif El-Din, Vice President, Enterprise & Commercial, IBM Middle East and Africa, says: “Digital reinvention is at an inflection point as businesses enter the next chapter of their cloud journey. Most enterprises today are approximately 20 percent into their transition to the cloud. In this first chapter of their cloud journey, businesses made great strides in reducing costs, boosting productivity, and revitalising their customer-facing innovation programs. Chapter two, however, is about shifting mission-critical workloads to the cloud and optimising everything from supply chains to core banking systems.”
He says to succeed in the next chapter of the cloud, businesses need to manage their entire IT infrastructure, on and off-premises and across different clouds –private and public –in a way that is simple, consistent and integrated. Businesses are seeking one common environment they can build once and deploy in any one of the appropriate footprints to be faster and more agile.
“This is why our acquisition of Red Hat is very important. Today, Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies are paired with the unmatched scale and depth of IBM’s innovation and industry expertise, and sales leadership in more than 175 countries. Joining forces enables us to offer more innovation to a broader range of organisations and meet the growing demand for the hybrid model,” he adds.
IBM has been offering cloud managed services to organisations across various sectors globally and in the region, and today, it continues to help its customers through its data centres in the UAE. Customers will not only be able to migrate their IBM and non-IBM based workloads and business applications to the data centres but can also have IBM manage and modernise them and handle their day-to-day operations. As a result, they will have the ability to free their IT resources to focus on adding value to the business and rapidly address fluctuating business demands and industry changes.
Additionally, the data centres will deliver data backup and protection services for customers. In the cases of network failure or downtime, data and workloads hosted in the local data centres will be recovered.
“All sectors can benefit from our services. However, we see that primary interest will be generated by the banking and government sectors, given the strict data sovereignty requirements and restrictions,” says El-Din.
For customers looking to move their workloads to the cloud, IBM says it will do all the heavy lifting and reduce the complexity of migration.
“With the acquisition of Red Hat, IBM has invested in a robust container platform based on Red Hat OpenShift. This enables customers to develop and run cloud-native applications designed to run in a multi-cloud environment. In addition, IBM introduced five Cloud Paks that enhance the Red Hat Openshift container platform with additional capabilities, like DevOps, security, data, and cloud-native middleware applications. All these services are available and can be delivered from our UAE data centres as a managed cloud service,” adds El-Din.
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