Public cloud will stay “relegated” to non-essential administrative functions in the Middle East until local cloud services become available, according to Infoblox’s local head, writes Eliot Beer.
Cherif Sleiman, vice president for the Middle East and Africa at cloud, DNS and IP address management firm Infoblox said while there was a lot of value for enterprises in public cloud services, companies in the Middle East just do not trust them with critical data.
“Today, there’s a lot of concern about the NSA spying – so everyone has a lot of concern about data sovereignty. Even in the region, take a look at the political turmoil – neighbours are fighting, or they can’t stand each other. There’s an absolute lack of trust, for getting over the data sovereignty problem,” said Sleiman.
“So, public cloud in our region will be relegated for a very long time to come – most public cloud providers today are outside the region. This model is going to change – we have some public cloud initiatives that are within the region, so those will change the adoption. But until then, public cloud initiatives will be relegated to administrative applications such as Office, calendaring, and, to some extent, email,” he added.
But Sleiman said even moving these lower-level applications to the cloud could bring benefits: “Those types of things, where you can offload your IT from having to manage them – if you take a look at helpdesk, most helpdesk requests are around administrative issues. So organisations can realise benefits from throwing those applications into the cloud – who cares if they go away?”
