A new EMEA survey report by Cloudera, a hybrid data cloud company, revealed that organisations in the Middle East are embracing the public cloud as 71% already use the public cloud and 86% plan to move more data to the cloud in the next one to three years.
Cloudera surveyed IT decision-makers across the EMEA region to learn about their organisation’s cloud and data management practices, identifying the challenges businesses face in making their data actionable. The study was consulted as part of their research for Evolve Dubai.
The study revealed that organisations within the Middle East are progressively turning to cloud solutions. Over the past 12 months, 71% of organisations within the region have moved their data to the public cloud.
The study identified a consistent need for enhancement within the region with 86% of organisations looking to move more data to the cloud over the next three years, citing empowering faster innovation (47%) and improving sustainability (42%) and data accessibility (40%). Yet at the same time, 90% plan to repatriate some data back to on-premises environments over the same period.
Although the Middle East’s cloud adoption journey shows great promise, many organisations have yet to uncover the full potential of this transformative technology. IT complexity and integration challenges (60%), non-compliance-related cybersecurity concerns (58%) and data governance and compliance concerns (49%) were identified as the main reasons for organisations not moving more of their data to the cloud.
Sixty-six percent of respondents in the Middle East agree that having data across different cloud and on-premises environments makes extracting value from all the data in their organisation very complex. However, a majority of organisations (72%) currently store data in a hybrid environment, meaning they utilise both the on-premises/private and public cloud.
“Many organisations are going ‘all in’ on the cloud, only to then find themselves needing to move some data back on-premises for cost, governance and data sovereignty reasons. With data sitting across a mosaic of hybrid cloud environments, many organisations are finding it difficult to fully extract value from their data assets,” said Ahmad Shakora, Group Vice President, Emerging Markets at Cloudera. “Organisations need the capability to securely extract value from their data, regardless of where it resides. But with the emergence of modern data architectures, organisations can drive more value from their data and optimise their cloud costs at the same time.”
Organisations are increasingly embracing data analytics to extract more value from their data. IT departments have the most significant requirement for data analytics (76%), followed by operations (48%) and sales and marketing (46% respectively). However, 84% of Middle East respondents believe their organisation has too many data analytics tools and are concerned about sprawl. Yet, a majority (74%) are fully confident they know how many data analytics tools they have deployed across their organisation.