EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
MAHMOUD EL KORDY , BUSINESS UNIT EXECUTIVE ,
IBM SYSTEMS , MIDDLE EAST & PAKISTAN
In the new era we are living today , many organisations are having to transform traditional business models to deliver innovative digital experiences and offer their personalised services to their customers through digital channels that are trusted , secure and highly available . As a result , the data storage market in the Middle East has been steadily growing , driven mainly by the uptake of advanced technologies such as AI and Big Data as part of the Digital Transformation journeys that organisations in the region have embarked on . Data storage plays a key role in every transformation journey where the data has become the currency that fuels competitive advantage for every successful business . Also , an increasing demand for smart phones and other devices underpinned by the Internet of Things ( IoT ) along with a massive growth in social media channels has also increased the demand for additional storage . This continues to drive the growth and demand for advanced data storage solutions in Middle East and Africa ( MEA ).
CIOs are shifting their budgets to keep the businesses running , where they will be exploring options to :
• Reduce cost through technology like data reduction , compression and de-duplication that will continue to be essential while CIOs can delay the next purchase cycle
• Optimise current resource utilisation through virtualisation technology and adapting software defined storage capabilities
• Enhance their data security and cyber resiliency through technologies such as encryption and air gapped copies that allow organisations to protect their data against logical corruption and cyberattacks
• Leveraging hybrid cloud architecture where organisation can leverage the flexibility of moving their data between on-premise , public and private cloud . This is why storage also needs to be cloud ready and support the persistent data layer for all containers and micro-services
• That said , a hybrid cloud model is the future . Hybrid clouds create a new data environment for persistent storage that comes with new requirements for performance , protection , security and manageability between the various cloud and premises .
There have been significant advancements in storage technologies over the last decade or so . First , software defined storage ( SDS ) transformed the way storage used to be consumed and analytics-based insights into the storage area networks ( SAN ) and Storage infrastructures helped organisations drive the maximum value out of the underline hardware . Recent developments in storage technologies around NVMe and SCM are extremely valuable for data driven businesses as the technology does not only offer significantly higher performance and lower latencies for existing applications , but also enables new capabilities for real time data processing in hybrid cloud environments .
That aside , compute and network have become equally critical to maximise the potential of enterprise storage deployments . CIOs need to make sure that their compute and network architectures support these state-of-the-art communication protocols like NVMe and the fastest media which are storage class memory ( SCM ) drives .
Going forward there will always be an opportunity in every challenge . The impact of the pandemic is and will continue to influence the priorities of businesses in 2021 and beyond . CIOs are shifting their budgets to keep their businesses running and will be looking to reduce cost , optimise capacity utilisation , and enhance security more than ever before . Data has become core to every business and storage plays a key role in making sure that the most important asset of an organisation is stored securely and effectively .
28 INTELLIGENTCIO AFRICA www . intelligentcio . com