An independent market research survey commissioned by Riverbed Technology, the application performance company, reveals that 62 per cent of IT decision makers in the Middle East are looking to centralise applications during 2013. The Riverbed commissioned survey questioned 400 CIOs in the Middle East and Europe about their spending priorities this year.
56 per cent of those surveyed in the Middle East indicated that security and compliance was a primary concern for investment, with 54 per cent citing server virtualization as a priority. Additionally, 52 per cent reported server upgrades as a priority, making these three areas the most common CIO spending priorities for 2013.
74 per cent of CIOs in the Middle East are planning a consolidation project reported data security as the key driver for their programmes. Other reasons provided for undertaking consolidation projects included a desire for greater control of application and server upgrades (also at 74 per cent) and the need to reduce the cost of managing distributed servers at the branch office layer (61 per cent).
Risto Wieland, director of IT at Swiss Re explained why they embarked upon a consolidation project. “We needed to simplify our network management by consolidating applications back to the data centre and removing as many servers as possible. We chose to implement a wide area network (WAN) optimization solution from Riverbed to ensure application performance. As a result we have removed hundreds of servers from our regional data centres and remote offices, and consolidated 95 per cent of all applications to the two Zurich data centres. This has reduced the amount of time spent on network management which is a huge benefit and both local backups and backups over the WAN are now no longer necessary.”
Darius Kuzma, senior network architect at Swiss Re, added: “Centralization has provided even better data security as there is less distributed data. Our disaster recovery procedures have improved, because we can now back-up data centrally rather than backing up locally or across the WAN.”
The study also revealed that the biggest barrier to embarking on a virtualization / consolidation project was application performance over the WAN, with 60 per cent of those not undertaking a project citing this reason. The costs of initial set-up as well as complexity were also reported as concerns by 50 per cent and 46 per cent respectively.
“This study shows that more CIOs than ever recognise the importance of centralizing technology and data to gain efficiencies. Although for some, barriers must be overcome before they can consider virtualizing or consolidating their applications, or removing branch office servers, the results demonstrate that most decision makers understand the cost and time savings that these projects can bring,” said Willem Hendrickx, SVP EMEA at Riverbed.
“Companies in the Middle East are increasingly looking at deploying new virtualization and consolidation technologies to best serve the unique needs of their business. Although these can be time consuming and costly, an accurate and broad understanding of IT infrastructure is a necessity for successful implementations and smoother transitions,” added Taj Elkhayat, general manager, MENA.
This survey was conducted by Vanson Bourne, the independent specialist technology market research company on behalf of Riverbed Technology. 400 CIOs in United Arab Emirates, France, Germany, Poland and United Kingdom were questioned as part of the survey.
