ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
aggressively and proactively will become
victims of cloud shift and diminish their
ability to compete for the new cloud-based
solution opportunities.
Cloud shift represents both risk and
opportunity. During this period of market
disruption, strategic planners should
carefully watch the impact of cloud shift
on traditional businesses.
Weak practices
Ossama Eldeeb, Senior Manager, MENA
Partner Organisation, VMware.
forecast to be $175 billion in 2017, growing
to $181 billion through 2020. In contrast,
spending on cloud system infrastructure
services IaaS, will grow from $34 billion in
2017 to $71 billion through 2020. By the
end of 2020, spending on IaaS will equate
to 39% of total spending on datacentre
systems. As spending shifts from traditional
systems to cloud services, there is both great
risk and opportunity. Through 2020, an
increasing percentage of annual IT spending
will be directly or indirectly impacted by a
cloud shift, making cloud computing one
of the most disruptive forces in IT markets
since the early days of the digital age.
When organisations are faced with IT
spending decisions, the consideration of
using cloud services for new initiatives, or
to replace existing systems, causes a shift
in spending from traditional IT solutions
to cloud. This results in the cloud shift,
and it is happening more often due to a
cloud-first direction most organisations
take when making IT spending decisions.
“This cloud-first orientation will
continue to increase the rate of cloud
adoption and, consequently, cloud
shift,” said Ed Anderson, Research Vice
President, Gartner. “The rate of cloud shift
will be different based on the dynamics of
each market segment.”
Cloud shift is not just about cloud. As
organisations pursue new IT architectures
and operating philosophies, they become
prepared for new opportunities in digital
Ed Anderson, Research Vice President, Gartner.
Mohammed
Shehata, CEO and
Founding Partner of
C-suITe Consulting.
Mohannad Abuissa,
Head of Sales
Engineering East
Region, Cisco ME.
business, including next-generation IT
solutions such as the Internet of Things.
Organisations embracing dynamic,
cloud-based operating models position
themselves for cost optimisation and
increased competitiveness.
For these reasons, technology and service
providers must be aggressive in recognising
and exploiting IT spending shifts to capture
the revenue opportunities of the future, and
manage revenue of the past.
Cloud shift is not necessarily inevitable,
but trends indicate a preference for cloud
services in most situations. Providers
of all types must ensure they remain
vigilant and proactive in pursuing new
cloud-related growth opportunities, while
divesting businesses that will become
materially impacted by cloud shift.
Providers that do not manage this change
A key enabling technology for
administration and operation of a modern-
day datacentre is the use of a Datacentre
Infrastructure Management tool. The
uptake of Datacentre Infrastructure
Management tools in the region,
unfortunately, has been very slow and
this has resulted in datacentres being
inefficient and not well managed from an
operational response perspective.
“Those that have adopted Datacentre
Infrastructure Management have not
considered the actual needs required
to be achieved by the tool and hence
not customised it enough to realise the
benefits that it could reap, which has
unfairly reflected badly on some of the
tools,” says Mohammed Shehata, CEO and
Founding Partner of C-suITe Consulting.
The adoption of cloud services or
other XaaS solutions should have driven
datacentres in the region in a different
direction. “However, there are still
what I refer to as server huggers who
feel more comfortable having physical
hardware rather than virtual hardware or
no hardware at all, owned by the service
provider,” says Shehata.
“We are seeing initiatives driving
more datacentre builds in the hope
of more adoption of public cloud or
hosting services, but with the major
users of datacentres in the region being
government entities, security of data is
impacting potential adoption.”
“The major challenge I have seen
in the region is for CIOs to receive the
information they need to be able to make
strategic decisions for their organisation.
As highlighted earlier, the lack of
Datacentre Infrastructure Management
results in a lack of clear and reliable data
as well as business intelligence data, that
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