Enterprises Focusing More on Cloud Computing and Virtualisation, Says Survey by eHosting DataFort

56% Organisations Allocated Higher IT Budgets in 2010

         

Dubai-UAE: 8 February, 2011 – Over 40 per cent of organisations are planning to implement cloud computing technologies within the next one to two years, according to a survey conducted by eHosting DataFort, the region’s leading Managed IT and Advisory services provider and a member of TECOM Investments.

The survey was conducted in partnership with Dubai-based ITP Publishing Group. The IT Trends Survey 2010 highlighted the key industry trends based on responses from over 370 regional CIOs, IT managers and IT executives across 11 countries in the region. Majority of the respondents were from the UAE (46 per cent) and Saudi Arabia (24 per cent).

Apart from Cloud Computing, virtualisation has also emerged as one of the key focus areas of growth and the survey has revealed that 23 per cent of organisations have already implemented virtualisation while 36 per cent plan to virtualise their infrastructure in one to two years.

Surprisingly, despite analysts and experts expecting IT budgets to make a slow revival in 2010, the survey has shown otherwise. According to the survey, more than 56 per cent of organisations have allocated higher IT budgets during 2010.

The respondents were from diverse industry sectors such as IT (35 per cent), government/public sector (10 per cent), construction (7.0 per cent), oil and gas (8.0 per cent), trading and distribution (6.0 per cent), banking and financial services (4.0 per cent), shipping and logistics (2.0 per cent) as well as aviation (1.0 per cent).

The key areas of investments identified by organisations include PC hardware (48 per cent), network and security (46 per cent), servers (46 per cent) and backup and storage (43 per cent).

Organisations considered business productivity, infrastructure improvements and cost reduction as the three most important strategic priorities for 2010 and the survey indicated that 29 per cent of the organisations were considering using an external data centre.

Yasser Zeineldin, CEO of eHosting DataFort, said: “The survey clearly outlines the emerging trends prevalent in the industry. Today’s CIOs face various challenges in managing their IT environments due to the need to improve business efficiencies despite the lack of skilled manpower and tight IT budgets. In order to overcome some of these challenges, they are increasingly looking at partnering with service providers in order to capitalize on the skilled resources and standardized processes for the efficient delivery of IT operations.

Interestingly, the survey has pointed out that using a Service Provider Data Centre is increasingly gaining significant attention. This has been highlighted mainly to reduce capital investments (35 per cent), achieve better control of operational costs through fixed monthly subscription fees (35 per cent) and an ability to scale or shrink dynamically (30 per cent).”

In addition, the most common outages experienced by most organisations have been identified as hardware/software failures (34 per cent), power disruptions (29 per cent) and application infrastructure failures (16 per cent). The survey results have shown an increased shift towards Disaster Recovery (DR) services as 32 per cent of organisations plan to invest in a secondary DR site in the coming one to two years.

A market leader in Managed IT and Advisory services, with a team dedicated to disaster recovery and business continuity management (BCM) and supported by world-class data centers, eHosting DataFort deploys a resilient and scalable infrastructure with round-the-clock operations.

With a wide network of technology and channel partners within the GCC/MENA, Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific regions, eHosting DataFort has been recognised for its innovative use of new technology in 2009, Best Colocation Facility in 2010 and consecutively awarded the region’s ‘Best IT Service Provider of the Year’ in 2008, 2009 and 2010.