(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) Middle East enterprises need to upgrade their networks to avoid a slowdown in productivity and an impact financially, according to a latest report by networking vendor Brocade.
The company recently announced the results of its global survey of 1,750 IT decision-makers that evaluated the current state of their data centre environments. An large number of respondents - 91 per cent - have revealed that they do not believe that their current IT infrastructures are equipped to meet the demands of cloud computing and virtualisation.
This global trend is especially worrying for businesses in the Middle East where cloud-related IT investments are expected to increase substantially in the next few years.
According to a recent IDC report, emerging markets, which include the Mena region, will witness the fastest growth in cloud spending anywhere in the world, collectively growing at 44.1 per cent until 2016. The UAE cloud market alone is set for a compound annual growth rate of 43.7 per cent until 2016, it said.
This means that the share of cloud spending by emerging markets almost double from 13 per cent in 2011 to 24.9 per cent in 2016, which will account for almost 30 per cent of net-new public IT cloud services spending growth, the IDC said
Sufian Dweik, regional director for Mema at Brocade Communications, said: "Businesses across the Middle East are starting to welcome cloud computing in a big way. The rapid uptake of virtualisation is proof of this. However, many of these organisations risk long-term failure as only small fractions of their IT budgets are spent on network infrastructure and this too is limited to merely scaling up legacy networks. Unless there is a change in mindset and willingness to consider the long term implications, businesses are likely to see long-term complications."
Dweik's concerns are confirmed by the report that states that a third of businesses experience multiple network failures each week, with as high as 16 per cent complaining of daily network outages.
These are caused largely due to database applications (41 per cent), communication tools (30 per cent) and Microsoft Office programs (25 per cent) as new services such as video conferencing and application delivery to remote devices add to the strain on already unfit networks.
Tied in to the concerns of loss of productivity due to downtime, over half of the survey's respondents reported that network failure has either directly or indirectly resulted in financial impact.
Dweik believes that Middle East enterprises need to invest in purpose-built data centres that offer high flexibility to meet with varying pressures.
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