EC News DeskCondo Protego, as one of the region’s leading specialised data centre systems integrators, has seen strong success in offering customers the Dell EMC and VMware entire stack of modern data centre solutions, from storage to security and analytics, along with hybrid cloud solutions. As converged and hyper-converged infrastructure, which can be complicated to install properly, Middle East organisations should rely on specialised, knowledge, and experienced channel partners for installing pre-engineered and modular infrastructure systems. Channel partners increasingly need to move from being generalists to being value-added resellers and systems integrators, especially for modern data centres.
As Middle East organisations digitally transform, they are also facing more complex business requirements, higher performance, and more applications generating more data, especially as more firms move to remote working in the COVID-19 coronavirus era.
As a result, CIOs are facing a turning point in their data centre modernisation. Data centres have moved from a cost centre to a profit centre. Modern data centres, with software-defined solutions and storage virtualisation, are vital for scaling up as organisations grow.
Vendors of data centre solutions are educating CIOs that one of the main factors in data centre modernisation is business resiliency, with public and private sector employees, customers, and citizens expecting around-the-clock availability of services.
Business resiliency is especially vital in the COVID-19 coronavirus era, and we expect a continued shift in business continuity procedures and policies to help organisations remain robust moving forward.
Organisations need to work with channel partners to ensure that they have the redundancy in place to deliver application and resource availability, with strict RTOs and RPOs. Redundancy applies to every industry vertical and use case, from aviation through autonomous vehicles.
The future of the Middle East enterprise data centre is in organisations moving to a hybrid cloud model, in which business applications and workloads are hosted within both the public cloud and local private clouds. Customers increasingly want to move between clouds to optimise costs, performance, risk, and scalability.
Worldwide, a Veritas survey shows that organisations are using 4 or more cloud providers, which in turn requires effective multi-cloud management. Channel partners can also help organisations to navigate the challenges of data migration between clouds and the potentially costly and time-consuming issue of cloud vendor lock-in.
By 2025, Middle East organisations will have largely adopted modern data centres, with elements including:
Flash solutions, which can significantly reduce floor space, power consumption, and cooling requirements, optimising costs and delivering consistent and predictable low-latency performance.
Cloud-enabled infrastructure, which can deploy, manage, and extend information and applications from their data centre to a public or enterprise cloud provider, to achieve agility, speed, and efficiency
Scale-out storage, with a modular approach to scaling out the infrastructure delivering low-cost of entry and few resources.
Software-defined infrastructure, which can leverage APIs and software for a more agile, flexible, and programmable approach across storage, servers, networking, SD-WAN, and cybersecurity.
