HYBRID CLOUD – STRIKING A BALANCE

Since 2020, the Kingdom has seen an unprecedented increase in cloud adoption rate both in Government and Public/Private Enterprises. The primary reason for shifting the infrastructure to the cloud is due to the digital transformation happening in every sector in the Kingdom. With just another 5 years to realize the VISION 2030 objectives, the importance given to building digital infrastructure is remarkable.

At Detasad, we are witnessing a new era of infrastructure requirements wherein the customers are gearing up to transform their IT organization in order to embrace the VISION 2030 objectives. In our interaction with several IT leaders across different sectors, we have understood how the cloud strategy would be unfolding in the future. In their point of view, the core applications which are business critical and have privacy related data would be in a private cloud with dedicated infrastructure including compute, storage and network. However, the classic “private cloud” instance, which in many case, is to virtualize workloads in an on-prem data center, is not preferred. Most of the customers are looking at enhancing the features of the private cloud to mimic the functions and features of a public cloud. For eg: the need for self-provisioning is becoming paramount importance. Similarly, auto-scaling of resources depending on the usage spike should be done with limited manual intervention. A lot of importance is also given to the data regulation requirements of the country.

Such requirements, have made us revamp the IT architecture of our customers completely. We have approached the requirement by categorizing the nature of applications based on their IOPS, network and compute needs. Besides, we have also seen the need for having dedicated infrastructure in Finance sectors for PCI/DSS, HSM compliance. We are also witnessing an paradigm shift in the concept of Disaster Recovery. While the conventional DR stresses on how the redundant infrastructure behaves in the event of a mishap, the need in the Kingdom is for designing more Availability Zones (AZ) so that the infrastructure is always active and prevalent.

Based on many CIOs opinion, the private cloud has many advantages that can give to a company including the application of exclusive regulatory requirements, the global visibility of security policies and access controls and the most important one is the cost effectiveness on long term even the CAPEX value is a bit high in the first stage.

In summary, we are seeing an increased demand of moving critical workloads to Private Clouds while the public cloud infrastructure is used primarily for non-critical and research-oriented applications. Our view is that this trend will continue and will mature significantly in the KSA as the digital transformation gains more momentum. As a Tier 2 Cloud Service Provider, our ability to architect a customized solution will not only be future proof but also be extremely resilient to changes in the business model for any customer. Thus, the Kingdom will be a trendsetter in striking an optimal balance towards adopting a Hybrid cloud strategy.