Channel Post speaks to Clinton O’ Leary, the Business Development Director of Yvolv, about the cloud services market in the region
What is the cloud computing market like in the region?
The UAE is considered the most ‘cloud ready’ country in the region, largely fueled by Government programs such as Vision 2021 and large organizations paving the way with digital transformation projects such as RTA, DEWA and Dubai Police. Yvolv’s independent research on the region’s market has shown that cloud solutions are growing year on year in terms of adoption and the traditional data centre is dying.
The factors that fuel this growth are that organizations are now aware of the benefits of cloud solutions and the countless benefits they offer to businesses of any size. Reduction in total cost of ownership, running costs of cloud over traditional data centres, Disaster recovery sophistication and the flexibility that cloud solutions bring to businesses is undeniable.
How strong is the cloud infrastructure services market in the region?
There is a high demand for Cloud infrastructure services in the Middle East and Africa, however, there needs to be a clear differentiation to the strength of each service provider offerings such as:
- Local Data Center presence – Data Sovereignty / Latency / Interconnectivity
- Cloud vs Managed Services Provider – Self Service / Auto Scaling / Service Catalogue
- Focused Sales and Support teams that are resident in country.
- Consulting and Services capabilities.\
What sort of cloud services are being used in the Middle East and African regions today?
Predominantly Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Disaster Recovery as a Service (DraaS) and Back-up as a Service (BaaS) are the main cloud services that are being used in the region. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is also seeing an increase in popularity, along with Big Data (Analytics) and Mobility PaaS is emerging.
How popular are cloud services in the Middle East and African regions according to you?
They are very popular – Some of the largest companies / brands in the region are already using Cloud and embracing a Hybrid Cloud Strategy.
What kind of organizations/industries usually opt for cloud services in the region?
Cloud services are currently popular with the following sectors: Airlines, Retail (eCommerce), Service Providers (Broker Services for Saas), Logistics, Oil and Gas, Education, Finance and Healthcare. Government entities are already working with local “Managed Services” Providers.
What sort of revenue model does your company use for the cloud services you offer on the market?
We provide our services following an elastic model, which is
- On-Demand as a Service – Pay as you Go
- Monthly, Quarterly or Annual Billing
- Per project basis – Digital Transformation
How do you work with your channel partners to ensure optimum services are offered to clients?
We work on a referral or agency basis with smaller partners and then on a strategic level with larger partners involved in larger / longer term projects.
How cost-effective are cloud services compared to regular data storage methods?
Companies save cost in several ways:
- The actual Data Center facility, there is no real estate management required for the company, no electro mechanical cost or issues, especially electricity power investment, and everything thing else incumbent to the cost of actual infrastructure.
- Hardware costs, instead of a company having to invest in servers and data centers, an entire IT infrastructure, moving to a cloud solutions eliminates this completely.
- Software costs, there is no operating system cost or license fees, in case of SaaS (software as a service) there are no applications licenses to worry about and keep paying for, likewise for monitoring of the entire system, there is no software management required at all and therefore eliminates further cost or investment in this regard.
- Let’s not forget manpower, All the points above require human input, when adopting cloud technology all of this is managed and delivered by the cloud provider. Over time, the only required manpower to manage a cloud consumer’s IT requirements will be IT strategists and applications engineers for any specific application clients use.
Given the rise of cybercrime in the region, how secure and trustworthy are cloud services here?
The level of security depends on the Cloud provider. For Yvolv this is a core differentiator as we as employees go through security screening being part of Meraas and secondly from a technology perspective we leverage Alibaba’s real world experience and practices in Data Protection.
Alibaba has many Security solutions that are offered locally on Yvolv’s infrastructure, such as:
- System Intrusion Protection
- Data Breach Prevention
- Content Security
- Anti-Fraud
- Anti-DDoS WAF
What are some of the most bothering security concerns related to it?
The top threats for cloud cyber security are data breaches, weak identity, credential and access management, as well as insecure interfaces and APIs. Other threats would be account hijacking, data loss and denial of service.
