Pure Storage, the market’s leading independent all-flash data platform vendor for the cloud era, has announced the results of ‘Evolution 2017′, a groundbreaking independent global research survey that explores the ways businesses in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) and across the globe are balancing infrastructure and applications, today and beyond.
The global research, which included a survey of 500 IT decision makers in the MEA region, finds that 73% of businesses in the region are committed to being information-based companies and as such, are embracing digital transformation. The key factors driving adoption of digital solutions in the region are new business models (52%), need for faster innovation (47%), customer demand (47%), competition (43%), new customer acquisition (43%) and cost saving initiatives (42%).
It’s clear that businesses in the region are facing digital transformation head-on, as 77% see more demand in the business for real time analytics and interactive simulations than a year ago and digital solutions are typically driving almost half of revenue (47% on average) for MEA organisations today.
But despite this growth, technical complexity (53%) and reliance on IT to deliver strategy (41%) have prevented businesses in the MEA region from truly becoming digital. Public, private and hybrid cloud, SaaS and traditional on-premises all have momentum, but businesses still lack confidence in where to place specific workloads:
• On average, businesses in the MEA region are running 48% of applications with traditional on-premise IT – higher than both public cloud (23%) or private cloud (24%)
• Security (57%), availability (52%) and performance (47%) are cited as key drivers for continued use of traditional on-premise and as such, 39% of businesses expect their on-premise usage to grow over the next 18-24 months
• Although security continues to be cited as the main concern with public cloud (38%), 69% of businesses say they will increase their public cloud usage in the next 18-24 months. In parallel, private cloud (57%) and SaaS (56%) usage are also expected to grow in the same time frame
• Interestingly, 76% of businesses in the MEA region think that cloud and on-premise should complement one another rather than compete
“’Evolution 2017’ shows that businesses in the Middle East and Africa are making significant steps towards digital transformation, but the report also reveals some key barriers to progress. Cloud confusion seems evident in workload fragmentation and cloud repatriation. As data volumes continue to grow and unlock greater opportunities, managing and harnessing data with a future-proofed approach is essential for organisations in the region,” said James Petter, Vice President, EMEA at Pure Storage.
“Pure’s vision is to help customers put their data to work, by delivering an end-to-end data platform, built for the cloud era, that provides the effortless and scalable block, file, and object storage services necessary to run classic applications, test/dev, big data analytics, and modern webscale apps – all with the speed and efficiency of flash,” concluded James.
As businesses in the MEA region accelerate in to the ‘Cloud Era’, Pure Storage is committed to helping them gauge where they are in terms of balancing infrastructure and applications in their business and providing guidance on how they can future-proof their storage infrastructure to capitalise on opportunities offered by the cloud. To this end, in late August, Pure Storage announced that it will be participating at GITEX 2017 (Hall 6, Stand CLD-15). The company will use GITEX as a platform to share insights and discuss the findings of the ‘Evolution 2017’ survey as well as showcase its all-flash data platform for the cloud era, powered by the combination of FlashArray//X, the company’s first all-NVMe, enterprise-class, all-flash array for high-performance structured data workloads and FlashBlade, the company’s all-flash array built for high-performance unstructured data workloads.
