Seek The Silver Lining

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According to a report by Gartner, by 2019, the total public cloud services spending in the MENA region will rise to $1.42 billion, with the largest growth coming from cloud management and security at 21 percent. This is then followed by SaaS and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) with growth rates of 20.2 percent and 19.3 percent respectively.

This should spell good news for channel partners who have invested in and bet big on hosting cloud services for their customers, particularly as they look towards new more IT-intensive digital services such as VR and AI.

Conflicting with this rapid growth, however, is a small fraction of channel partners who are starting to pull back from the cloud. This isn’t happening by chance – it’s driven by a wider trend of businesses taking the same approach. Historically, businesses in the Middle East have always been a little more cautious than other regions to adopt a public cloud approach preferring to host sensitive data in their own private cloud. This, coupled with a shortage of local facilities who are able to host the data on the ground, make the choice to switch to a public cloud even more challenging.

So, how should channel partners react to ensure they can stay relevant and in business?

Hidden costs