One of the logistics companies in Dubai dedicated eighteen months to the process of transferring all its activities to AWS, moving to the modern infrastructure, auto-scaling, and gaining international coverage. But a critical application could not migrate correctly, and its performance deteriorated unacceptably. Since the business needed a quick solution, the core operations in the company were not outsourced to the cloud, but instead they continued to be on-premise,s and the other processes were done on the cloud.
This was not what was meant to happen, and it was a reality. It is also consistent with the report by Flexer, which suggests that hybrid cloud strategies are used by seventy percent of all enterprises in the world (State of the Cloud Report). This is not due to the theoretical superiority of hybrid solutions, but because of practical limitations, legacy systems, regulatory requirements, and business priorities; pure cloud strategies are not feasible for the majority of organisations.
The UAE businesses that are most advanced in digital transformation are not challenging this fact. Rather, they are specifically pursuing multi-cloud and hybrid architectures, developing strategies that leverage the advantages of the cloud and factors of practice that pure cloud solutions ignore.
Reasons 70% of Enterprises are using Hybrid Cloud.
No other factor contributes to the hybrid adoption as much as legacy systems do. Business-critical applications on mainframes, specialised hardware, or integrated on-premise systems cannot be just lifted and shifted to the cloud. Rewriting such systems is expensive in terms of millions of dollars and poses risks that are unacceptable to the business stakeholders.
Sovereignty requirements in regulations and data prevent the migration of some workloads to the on-premises or particular regions. The Gulf financial institutions are subject to regulations that require their customer data to be kept in-country. Medical professionals go through analogs of HIPAA. Security-cleared data handling is mandatory for government contractors. These limitations make pure public-cloud strategies legally inaccessible to several organisations.
The performance and latency issues are important with regard to workloads. The HFT systems need microsecond or less latency, which the cloud cannot perform reliably. The production lines controlled by manufacturing systems require computing in place. UAE customers require regional infrastructure to use real-time applications, and this infrastructure is not provided by major cloud providers in all locations around the Gulf.
On-premises infrastructure is occasionally preferred in cost optimisation. Cloud economics are effective when used with a highly variable workload, but prove to be costly with a traditional compute workload that runs 24/7 over the years. Organisations that have predictable workloads and have the existing data-centre capacity typically operate baseline infrastructure on-premises, and utilize the cloud as burst capacity, as well as new applications.
Also read: What Works in the Gulf When 84% Struggle with Cloud Costs
Multi-Cloud Strategies of UAE Enterprises.
The UAE organisations that embrace a multi-cloud strategy employ more than one public cloud vendor in addition to on-premise infrastructure. This adds complexity; however, it fulfills actual business requirements that single cloud strategies failed to satisfy.
The evasion of vendor lock-in is a motivator for most multi-cloud decisions. Organisations have seen the cloud pricing models evolve and how much they are dependent on the roadmap and pricing of one provider. Workload diversification between AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offers bargaining powers and mitigates the risk of dependence on a single provider.
Advanced multi-cloud designs are motivated by the choice of the best-of-breed services. AWS is good at some of the specialised services. Azure fits better into the Microsoft ecosystem. Google Cloud has better AI and analytics solutions. Companies that have embraced the challenge of multi-cloud complexity do not have to push all their services on a single platform but utilise every provider where they work best.
The geographic coverage need drives the UAE companies towards multi-cloud. A company that has customers throughout the Gulf may apply AWS to Dubai, Azure to Saudi Arabia, to meet its government-cloud requirements, and local data centres in smaller markets where the big providers do not have a presence. It is this complexity that is of actual business need.
Multi-cloud design is advantageous to disaster recovery and business continuity. Having production in one cloud and disaster recovery in another cloud removes correlated failure modes. The failure of essential systems to move to Azure or on-premises infrastructure does not paralyze a business when there is a major AWS failure.
Lessons on Successful UAE Hybrid Cloud Implementations.
Enterprises in the UAE that use hybrid clouds work have similar tactics. They view hybrid as a planned and not an accidental result of the partial migration, and they make investments in the connectivity, tooling, and procedures that render the distributed infrastructure manageable.
Intense networking infrastructure is a must. Direct connections to AWS, ExpressRoute to Azure, and dedicated pages to on-premises data centres all have the high-bandwidth and reliable connection hybrid architectures needed. Organisations that have tried to operate a hybrid across the public internet networks are faced with performance and reliability issues.
Single identity and access control eliminates security loopholes. The complexity and risk are caused by users who authenticate individually to on-premises-based systems and multiple cloud providers. Winning implementations will take Active Directory or identity federation with full consistency throughout the board.
Monitoring and logging on a consistent basis in the various environments gives the required visibility. When logs are located in other systems with different formats, operations teams will not be able to troubleshoot them. Observability data of all clouds and on-premise infrastructure can be centralised into a single dashboards making hybrid environments manageable.
Guidelines in a clear location of workloads avoid paralysis in decisions. Teams require structures that define the location of the running applications. Such criteria can be data-sovereignty criteria, latency sensitivity criteria, regulatory criteria, price criteria, and integration criteria. In the absence of precise guidelines, any placement choice will be a protracted discussion.
Related: Buying Salesforce in the Middle East Is Easy. Making It Work Isn’t.
Multi-Cloud Workability in the UAE Organisations.
The UAE firms that have successfully implemented multi-cloud strategies do not strive to make all their applications portable across all platforms. They acknowledge the fact that it is usually more economical and efficient to integrate deep into a cloud than to sustain unneeded portability. They concentrate on portability, whereby business value is worth the complexity.
Infrastructure as Code is necessary in a multi-cloud environment. The cross-provider tools, such as Terraform, Pulumi, or other tools, allow a uniform way of deploying infrastructure. Teams determine infrastructure once and then roll it out to other clouds, with some level of similarity regardless of the differences between platforms.
Kubernetes offers portability of the application where it counts. Containerised applications, which are managed by Kubernetes, will be truly portably cross cloud. Organisations that work with well-defined loads benefit from containerisation through the multi-cloud flexibility without developing abstraction layers on their own.
Complexity is tamed in cloud management platforms. The tools that offer single dashboards, cost management, security posture monitoring, and policy enforcement across multiple clouds ease the operational burdens. Gulf organisations that are keen on multi-cloud investing in them as opposed to attempting to deal with all of them using native consoles.
At Blesssphere, we assist UAE business undertakings in steering between hybrid and multi-cloud approaches that meet their real business needs and not hypothetical fancifulness. The organisations that perform well are not those that are the most beautiful on whiteboards; they are those whose applications produce business value regardless of the infrastructure that is sensible in a particular application.