INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud
Oil price drop pushing gov’t
ministries towards cloud
The falling oil price is pushing government organisations to move towards
cloud and managed services, and leave behind their long-held preference for
self-owned and managed infrastructure, according to Adrian Pickering, VP for
Middle East and Africa at Juniper.
“
I’m observing right now a trend for
many large enterprises, and public
sector organisations, government
ministries like education, healthcare,
interior, even in defence across the
region – due to the pressures of oil price
on budget, and also some of the regional
conflicts being experienced, their
budgets are really under pressure, very
much under pressure,” said Pickering.
According to him, Juniper has seen
a number of government ministries
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INTELLIGENTCIO
across the region make mid-project
shifts, as a result of budget cuts: “A
ministry of education and a defence
ministry in the region, right now we’re
working with them on a transition from
developing a solution for them directly
– to them saying ‘we need to look
differently at how we execute against
our plans – what are the options?’
“What I’m observing is a move away
from building their own datacentre,
bringing or hiring their own expertise,
to a situation now where they are
seriously going towards the public or
private cloud providers, to provide the
solutions they need for their business,”
added Pickering.
In discussions with regional cloud
providers, Pickering said they had
also seen similar trends, which were
simply not there until the last few
months: “It’s been very interesting –
I’ve had a couple of meetings over
the last couple of days with the cloud
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