As companies and organisations of all shapes and sizes certainly know by now, the pandemic has starkly highlighted the need for change. As far as cloud strategies go, it clearly pointed to a need for organisational flexibility, with a number of national initiatives – such as Saudi Arabia’s Cloud First Policy – highlighting the need for robust cloud strategies to be planned and implemented across the Gulf region.
For a transitional solution, one needs look no further than hybrid cloud – which combines a private cloud with one or more public cloud services. In these cases, highly sophisticated software enables communication between separate services.
This strategy has its benefits. From an organisational standpoint, it provides considerable flexibility, as it allows workload to be shifted between various solutions as current needs require. They also give businesses greater control over their private data – an increasingly important factor in a world in which privacy concerns and security threats are increasingly prevalent.
Hybrid cloud, however, is not a long-term solution. It forms part of a pathway towards a reality in which the public and private sectors alike will use a fully integrated public cloud such as international providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform or public sovereign cloud providers, which provides a broad set of infrastructure services, such as computing power, storage options, networking, and databases, delivered on-demand. The need for this is more important than ever before, with challenges including governance, data and security threats rapidly rising as key focus areas that organisational personnel and the public need to be educated about.
This transitional phase should last between five to ten years. As this process takes place, there is likely to be resistance from those with lingering concerns – such as the governance issue I noted above. Alleviating these concerns will mean zeroing in on the things that will permit organisations and public sector entities to evolve in the way they want.
As an example, Bespin’s OpsNow solution allows organisations to have full oversight on multi-cloud subscriptions, giving customers a single unified tool to manage several multi-cloud platforms such as AWS and Huawei cloud for instance. With such a tool, a customer no longer needs to set or apply rules for various cloud environments, creating the possibility to manage cloud costs and cloud governance in a single solution.
In such an environment, a critical focus must be on data classification. Organisations must ask themselves whether some data needs to remain on premises. In such cases, how is the data most secure? Is it more secure on-premises vs public cloud? As an example The cost of on-site disk encryption can be a project worth millions of dollars in equipment and labor while it’s available instantly in cloud solutions.
E-commerce has led the way in terms of these solutions, with many organisations working in the sector looking for solutions that can increase stability, improve scalability, enhance security, and optimises cost.
In our own experience, we’ve seen numerous case studies, including some in the post Covid-19 environment in which regional e-commerce businesses stabilise and optimised at a time in which brick-and-mortar businesses were closing amid lockdowns.
There are several lessons that businesses can derive from the experiences of these e-commerce firms. For one, education is key. In our case, we use our own Bespin Academy and technologies to help organisations understand how to fully leverage the public cloud available to them.
As an interim strategy, hybrid, multi-cloud strategies allow organisations to benefit from varied cloud services, depending on where – and how – they want to use them with the appropriate level of security.
As of now, however, many organisations do not trust the solutions enough. This means that many firms will require guidance from companies such as Bespin Global to help consult and formulate the plans that will ultimately be necessary for the public and private sector in the region.
Going forward, we’ll also need to address why many organisations in the region still do not have enough confidence to trust external agencies with IT requirements, such as cloud MSP (Managed Services Providers).
For other tasks – such as marketing and consulting – companies across the Arabian Gulf are more than happy to rely on external sources. For IT, however, regional companies remain extremely different than their US and European counterparts in that they have yet to take similar steps. Most companies, we find, prefer to try to build solutions internally, even though doing so is often more expensive and not necessarily more effective.
Going forward, cloud strategies should focus on a number of areas. The first of these is migration, for which a systematic and stable approach based on methodology and best practices should be utilised.
The Second is DevOps, a process which involves agile shipping to market built on a solid feedback loop that insures quality, built-in security, distribution and simultaneous monitoring of infrastructure and APP performance takes place before even shipping a product.
Lastly – and vitally – companies must look to current conditions and determine how they will strive to become a data driven enterprise. Detailing this process – which can involve using data scientists and Big Data experts to determine the most effective practices for your business needs – will require the support of a thriving IT sector, built together by vendors and their trusted partners.
