Saudi Arabia To See More Focus On Cloud As COVID-19 Realities Set In

More than 25% of enterprises in Saudi Arabia have plans in place to deploy a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs. That’s according to the latest findings revealed by IDC’s annual Saudi Arabia CIO Survey, which also found that the three main obstacles to cloud rollouts in the Kingdom are insufficient migration capabilities, multi-cloud management challenges, and security concerns. The use of legacy applications and infrastructure, a lack of skills, and difficulties finding the right partners were also identified as key issues.

“As the reliance on multiple workloads hits a new high, accelerated by the global COVID-19 outbreak, IDC expects to see more and more organisations across the Kingdom embracing multi-cloud,” said Hamza Naqshbandi, IDC’s country manager for Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. “Uncertain market realities caused by the pandemic situation are forcing organisations to reevaluate their cybersecurity exposure as they pivot from a ‘cloud-last’ to a ‘cloud-also’ mindset. The most important aspect of this paradigm shift is going to be around how to stay responsive to customer needs, how to scale in a safe and secure manner, and how to facilitate the transition of work from an office desk to the home.”

IDC also anticipates an increase in security spending as enforced working-from-home practices expose corporate networks and computing devices to new levels of cybersecurity risk. Securing the cloud workloads used to perform work-related tasks has become extremely important and a failure to do so poses a significant threat to the organisation – operationally, financially, and reputationally.

“IDC believes the fallout from the COVID-19 outbreak will expose new security loopholes that cyber miscreants will exploit,” says Naqshbandi. “As a result, data breaches are expected to become more widespread, exacerbated by the notoriously unsecure habits of remote workers. As such, enterprises need to be prepared to respond to any cyberattack, data breach, or privacy violation that may arise as they grapple with these new market realities, particularly as the criticality of ensuring digital trust continues to rise.”

With such challenges in mind, IDC is delighted to announce the launch of two online events for Saudi Arabia – the IDC Security Webinar (June 22, 2020) and the IDC Cloud & Datacenter Webinar (June 29, 2020). These webinars are part of a series of online events that have been tailored for IT leaders and security executives looking to establish lasting digital trust, while ensuring their cloud-related investments are not only aligned with their corporate imperatives and the wider national vision, but also with the continually evolving COVID-19 situation.

Combining informative presentations, panel discussions, and interactive Q&A sessions, the webinars will explore the latest security threats facing the Kingdom and provide organisations with expert guidance on effectively benchmarking their cloud adoption strategies. Respected industry experts will engage in high-level discussions on embedding security and resilience into the core vision of the modern digital enterprise, while ensuring how to ensure desired outcomes in a highly complex IT environment that multi cloud adoption will bring around.

For the Security Webinar, IDC is delighted to welcome Trend Micro and Splunk as Platinum Partners, and Veeam Software as Gold Partner. For the Cloud & Datacenter Webinar, IDC is delighted to announce Veeam Software as Platinum Partner.