Harnessing the Power of Private Cloud for Regional Enterprises to Transform Their Data Centres

By: Tariq Salameh Solutions Engineer Manager, Middle East & Turkey, Cloudera

Control and efficiency, market regulation, and data location may prevent companies from using the public cloud, especially regarding data ingestion at the petabyte scale. These companies have instead opted to leverage their existing data centre investment. Turning the data centre into a private cloud brings the agility and flexibility of the public cloud to the control of on-premises infrastructure. With the private cloud capability in place, organisations can directly address the drawbacks of the traditional cluster deployments and move to data services.

While the majority of IT decision-makers (86%) in the Middle East plan to migrate more data to the cloud over the next three years, even more (90%) plan to repatriate data back on-premises. IT complexity and integration challenges (60%), non-compliance-related cybersecurity concerns (58%) and data and compliance concerns (49%) are cited as the main reasons for organisations not moving more of their data to the cloud, according to a Cloudera study.

Instead of the “cloud first”, we’re now in the “workload-first” era. Workload analytics can help determine if a workload is more suitable for an on-premises or public cloud environment. And 76% of organisations currently store data in a hybrid environment, meaning they utilise both on-premises/private cloud and the public cloud. Hybrid environments are the new de facto standard.

However, two-thirds (66%) of IT decision-makers in the Middle East agree that having data across different cloud and on-premises environments makes extracting value from all the data in their organisation complex. Siloed data prevents organisations from making fast decisions, so they need the capability to securely extract value from their data, regardless of where it resides. With the emergence of modern data architectures, organisations can optimise their cloud costs and drive more value from their data. At the same time, the data is AI-ready for enterprises to benefit from current and future developments in AI.

Many companies also need help with their cloud costs and unlocking continuous value from cloud investments. With enterprise data stored both on-premises and potentially across multiple public clouds, it becomes difficult to track and manage cloud consumption across various departments and cost centres, keep the platform stable and controlled, and troubleshoot issues across these different infrastructures. Companies need visibility into workload and resource utilisation to better control and automatically manage budget overruns and improve performance.