One of the Middle East’s biggest digital business trends in 2020 will be the alignment with 85 per cent of global organizations moving from public clouds to on-premise environments, according to industry experts.

Worldwide, 85 per cent of organizations in 2019 have planned to migrate data or apps from public clouds to on-premise private clouds, hosted private clouds, or on-premise non-clouds, according to the recent IDC Cloud and AI Adoption Survey.

Public clouds – from hyper-scale providers, local telcos, or multi-national technology vendors -- were once hailed for organizations to quickly, easily, and affordably scale IT infrastructure up and down.

Now, CIOs have experienced the challenging inflexibility of public clouds, said Condo Protego, a leading UAE-based IT infrastructure and information management consultancy and solutions provider.

“Based on our discussions with Middle East organizations, a growing number of CIOs are following global trends in moving some of their data and applications off of public clouds and onto on-premise environments,” said Praj Calthorpe, deputy GM, Condo Protego.

“Public cloud models can have hidden costs and limited flexibility, with many organizations increasingly moving to on-premise or hybrid cloud models.”

In their cloud repatriation, organizations most often cite factors such as security, performance, cost, control, and reducing shadow IT. But organizations are finding that copying their data back can consume a lot of labour and monetary resources – leading an increasing number of organizations to move to a hybrid cloud model.

“Cloud repatriation is not a frictionless process – it’s important for Middle East organizations to work with channel partners to align business outcomes and application requirements to find the best of both public and private clouds,” added Calthorpe.

“Hybrid cloud can deliver the right mix public and private clouds to optimize costs, performance, risk, and scalability of organizations’ data and apps.” – TradeArabia News Service