Middle East organizations moving to the hybrid cloud are helping to drive the global public cloud market to top USD 206 billion in 2019, industry experts announced today.

As Middle East CIOs optimize their business applications and competitiveness, organizations are increasingly choosing a hybrid cloud model. Core applications and sensitive data, such as banking or patient records, are kept on the local private clouds. Services that take up a lot of computing power, such as email, are running on public clouds from global providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Showing the strong growth in hybrid cloud, Gartner predicts the global public cloud services market will grow by 17 percent to a record-high of USD 206 billion in 2019. Serverless computing will go from the current 10 percent rate of adoption to mainstream by 2020-2022, according to a separate report from Gartner.

“The hybrid cloud market will reach new heights as Middle East organizations understand that their digital transformation relies on a mix of public and private clouds,” argues Savitha Bhaskar, Chief Operating Officer at the UAE-based IT infrastructure and information management consultancy and solutions provider Condo Protego. “With hybrid cloud, Middle East organizations can gain flexibility, scalability, and security to optimize costs based on application-level requirements.”

Moving information on, off, and between clouds can be time-consuming, and prohibitively expensive, requiring the support of specialized tools and services. However, VMware Cloud on AWS allows organizations to create unified environments across public and private clouds.

In the Middle East, Condo Protego is seeing especially strong demand for the Dell EMC VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure running VMware Cloud Foundation private cloud for customers looking to leverage VMware Cloud on AWS.

“With AWS planning to open several regional data centers in 2019, the Middle East is set to experience a rapid adoption of organizations running on AWS,” said Savitha Bhaskar. “Early adopters of AWS cloud can optimize their cloud environments for digital business, and free up their IT staff to support business innovation.”