UAE organizations rapidly investing in hybrid cloud environments will drive the country’s cloud business revenue to increase by Dh20 billion ($5.44 billion) to 2022, according to industry experts.

Showing the strong cloud opportunity, the UAE’s public cloud spend is set to quadruple to Dh1.5 billion by 2022, generating Dh20 billion in net new revenues and creating 55,000 jobs, according to a recent report by market research firm IDC.

Providing UAE organizations with integrated cloud experiences and digital workspaces, Dell Technologies and Microsoft recently announced an expanded partnership for VMware Cloud on the Microsoft Azure public cloud.

With Microsoft having announced plans to open its first Middle East data center in the UAE, organizations here are set to gain new levels of best practices in cloud business, said Andrew Calthorpe, CEO, at the UAE-based IT infrastructure and information management consultancy and solutions provider Condo Protego.

“As the UAE economy becomes more competitive, Microsoft’s upcoming data center will allow organizations to more rapidly adopt a cloud-first strategy to drive IT optimization and optimized costs,” said Calthorpe. “UAE’s cloud businesses can lead to new levels of business and economic growth.”

IDC adds that not every UAE organization needs to move solely to the public cloud. In fact, the highest levels of business innovation could come from a hybrid cloud model, with core applications running on-premise and others on the public cloud.

In the UAE, Condo Protego is seeing strong hybrid cloud demand among both medium and large enterprises, across every industry vertical from government and oil and gas, to education, retail, and transport and logistics.

“Specialized channel partners can help organizations determine their public cloud based on business operations and technology to optimize costs and agility,” added Calthorpe. “The UAE’s existing VMware customers are ideally-positioned to leverage the Microsoft data center to move to a consumption-based model, which means paying as you go and no longer having to worry about hardware or services.”

Condo Protego – Latin for “to store and protect” – is the leading regional ‘consultative solutions provider’. The company focuses on data storage, virtualization, data protection and security, providing 24/7 support. – TradeArabia News Service