Over the past few years, there has been a surge in demand for edge and hybrid computing as popular
enterprise applications look for state-of-the-art data centers for hosting services. In the Middle East and
Africa regions alone, the edge computing market is projected to reach $1.46 billion by 2023.
Cloud is quickly becoming the preference for many organizations that are looking to make the move. So
it’s no wonder that the Middle East already runs half of its workloads in hybrid clouds. In the next two
years, the region plans to increase hybrid cloud usage by 7%.
The growth of connected devices is changing how enterprises engage with customers in the digital
world. As such, a decentralized approach fully leverages cloud computing capabilities.
Let’s look at the role of edge and hybrid computing in the data center industry:
Edge Computing
From healthcare to manufacturing – businesses are increasingly using IoT (Internet of Things) in their
operations, which can cause many latency issues in their operations.
Given that it takes considerable time to produce data, send it miles over for processing, and to retrieve
the processed results, businesses can’t afford to accommodate delays. As 5G adoption rates increase,
the amount of data generated by IoT devices is only set to increase, worsening latency issues.
To succeed in a cut-throat business environment, businesses need to convey a large amount of data to
edge compute nodes quickly. Thanks to its high bandwidth and low latency networking, edge computing
enables businesses to connect computation resources to end-users and their IoT devices.
Edge computing applications are an ideal solution for real-time applications that need to respond to user
requests instantly.
Before edge computing, smartphone applications such as face scanning apps had to run algorithms
through cloud-based services, which took a lot of time.
With the edge computing model, algorithms can now run locally on edge servers or gateways, as well as
the smartphone itself, enhancing computing power for smartphones. Therefore, applications such as AR
and VR, smart cities, and even self-driving cars require fast processing and response rates.
In fact, smart city initiatives in Middle Eastern countries such as the UAE are using edge computing
capabilities to improve communication between cities, electronics, and automobiles within the smart
city infrastructure.
In addition, edge computing offers enhanced networking and storage capabilities. Moreover, an edge
cloud also provides automation, virtualization, orchestration of management and maintenance
activities, and workload segmentation by user or application.
Hybrid Cloud Computing
In 2019, the Middle East’s increasing adoption of cloud services helped bring the global public cloud
market to $206 billion.
Private (on-premises) and public clouds offer a wide range of benefits to users, attracting all kinds of
businesses from across MENA.
Users of private clouds enjoy strong levels of security as well as customization to fulfill their unique
requirements and regulatory needs. On the other hand, public cloud users benefit from relatively lower
prices and on-demand scalability to changing computing requirements.
However, hybrid clouds bring businesses the best of both worlds, presenting a combination of public
and private cloud service benefits with manageable shortcomings.
A hybrid cloud is the combined use of private clouds for mission-critical tests, resources and
development workloads, as well as public clouds from third-party providers for less confidential
workloads.
91% of enterprises in the Middle East say that hybrid cloud computing is their ideal IT model, and they
have plans to increase hybrid cloud usage.
Businesses that use hybrid cloud computing can enjoy high levels of security for critical workloads
despite multi-tenancy – and even leverage cost-friendly public cloud services for low sensitivity
workloads.
Hybrid computing allows an exceptional level of flexibility as well as additional options for data
deployment.
A new study released by Nutanix predicts that enterprise sectors in the Middle East, especially the UAE
will see explosive growth in hybrid cloud services as adoption rates are predicted to rise from 7% to 51%
in the next five years.
For businesses that require dealings with Big Data, hybrid computing is the perfect solution, enabling
them to service customers and assist employees with its elastic resources and scalability.
Moreover, hybrid cloud computing comes with quick deployment time, which proves useful when
businesses have to deal with fluctuating changes in requirements.
In Conclusion
Edge computing helps businesses address latency issues by bridging the gap between computation
resources, end-users, and IoT devices.
Consequently, hybrid computing perfectly combines private and public cloud resources.
The rise in both computing technologies isn’t meant to eradicate the need for one or the other. Instead,
a combination of edge and hybrid computing will enable businesses to improve their digital
infrastructures.
Together these computing technologies can help you maximize productivity and increase cost-savings.
In a region ridden by data security threats, Middle Eastern businesses that are new to the cloud and are
looking to improve security, privacy and latency can find ideal solutions in both edge and hybrid
computing technologies.