Exciting times lie ahead for the Middle East and Africa, as the region is on course to post the world’s highest cloud traffic growth by 2019, according to a Cisco report late last year.
Connected daily lives and businesses are becoming a reality across the Middle East, whilst neighbour and growing business partner, Africa’s rapid economic growth and wider Internet use is driving demand for higher bandwidth, creating more demand for data center space across the region.
DCD Converged Middle East and Africa is returning for the 11th year on 25 April in Dubai, and is set to gather leading IT experts from the public and private sector, to debate the growing IT infrastructure needs of the digital economy across the MEA region.
With Dubai and Qatar set to host the biggest yet World Expo 2020 and World Cup 2022 respectively, Middle East is on the path to become a global tech hub. And 2016 will see the region experience a much wider cloud adoption rate to enable the digital economy at a faster pace.
“Whilst adoption has been relatively conservative compared to Europe and North America, the rapid growth of cloud services signals a growing confidence in cloud technologies. In line with global trends, regional IT leaders are dipping their toes into the cloud with the hybrid model”, says Dr. Jassim Haji, Director of Information Technology at Gulf Air, who will be speaking at the event in April.
This ever-increasing demand for cloud services is ultimately driving not only the need for higher availability and more data center space, but also the need to upgrade existing facilities to the state of cloud-ready. According to the DCD Intelligence Global Data Center Trends and Market Overview Report 2015-2020, investments in colocation and outsourcing in the Gulf States will double by 2020.
“With heavy investments in smart initiatives, M2M solutions and e-commerce, IT leaders in the region are looking into how they can hyperconverge their IT to get ready for the hybrid cloud. The hybrid approach represents complicated architectures and emphasizes the need for a cloud-centric data center strategy capable of supporting hybrid IT environments,” says Nick Parfitt, Research Director, DatacenterDynamics.
DCD MEA looks at the full-stack of the data center and cloud infrastructure, from digital infrastructure ‘North of the rack, to critical physical infrastructure ‘South of the rack’ and the holistic ecosystem. On 25 April, delegates will participate, collaborate and network with peers to address these and many more questions, explore both technologies and best practices on the delivery of IT services in this “hyper-connected, digital world” specific to the region.
DCD is moving to a ‘free-to-attend, by invitation’ event model for qualified end-user business executives, managers and technical professionals directly engaged with IT, data center and cloud infrastructure. If your company operates its own on/off premise data center(s), or if you are a significant end-user of data center and cloud services and you are involved in technology planning, procurement, implementation, and operations, then you may qualify Click here to apply
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