UAE organizations rapidly investing in hybrid cloud environments will drive the country’s cloud business revenue to increase by AED 20 billion to 2022, industry experts announced today.

Showing the strong cloud opportunity, the UAE’s public cloud spend is set to quadruple to AED 1.5 billion by 2022, generating AED 20 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, argues 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 Andrew Calthorpe, CEO, Condo Protego. “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 larger 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 Andrew 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.”